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1.20 SOCIAL ABUSE -- TYPES AND CATEGORIES OF ABUSIVE BEHAVIOR

MEANING: Social abuse is a new term and is generally defined as follows: 1) the coercion of an individual in a public setting or 2) the collective abuse by a group of people toward an individual. One person can often manipulate a group to control another individual as at school. Social abuse uses the power of the group to embarrass and to intimidate.

MORE ABOUT SOCIAL ABUSE: For example, under the meaning of the first definition, teenagers can be made to feel embarrassed in front of their classmates or made to feel self conscious about the way they dress. Under the meaning of the second definition, people at a family gathering might make fun of a new girlfriend.

PERSONAL NOTE FROM RICK DOBLE: Virtually everyone has been made fun of at school and felt the sting of scorn from a crowd of people. And probably everyone has felt like an outsider at a gathering. A wider definition of abuse could extend to social issues such as racial or ethnic discrimination which have all the earmarks of abuse. In 1963-1964 as a young white person I was committed to the civil rights movement in North Carolina. I didn't really understand my reasons at the time, except that I knew discrimination was clearly unfair. I went to jail a couple of times when I sat-in at restaurants that did not serve an integrated group and we were arrested for trespassing. If the US Supreme Court had not thrown out the sit-in trespass arrests, I might have had trouble graduating from the University of North Carolina.

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