Defining Abuse

What is abuse?  How do we define it?

I heard this story from a gentleman of my acquaintance the other night, I'll call him Marv.   I wouldn't say we're friends, but we often end up in a certain social circle together, and we all happened to be talking about our childhoods and specifically our childhood Christmases.

"I had a great childhood," he said.  "I mean, there wasn't any abuse and mom and dad both seemed to enjoy their lives.  Mom stayed home and dad worked, it was really a 'Leave it to Beaver' kind of scenario.  There were some things that they did that I didn't do with my kids, but you know, it was more a reflection of the thinking at the time than anything else.  Dad was the disciplinarian and I remember a lot of 'you wait until your father gets home' type of scenarios..."

I'll have to loosely paraphrase what he said next because the alarm bells were ringing so loud in my head at that point that I could barely listen.  Marv went on to explain how the discipline worked in his childhood home, in which remember he'd just noted that there was no abuse.
When dad got home from work, mom would pass on the list of Marv's inadequacies or screw ups for the day to dad.  They'd have dinner.  After dinner dear old dad would look at Marv and say, "are you ready?"  At which point Marv would have to go to dad's bedroom, get his dad's belt, drop his pants and then dear old dad would whip Marv's bare ass with a belt until Marv cried or dad's arm got tired.  Marv specifically pointed out that the beatings lasted longer as Marv got older and became less inclined to cry.

Holy hell!  On what planet is this not abuse?

Imagine this, for a moment:  In the story above, imagine that Marv is mom.  Imagine that dear old dad is treating his wife like this.  Is it then abuse?  What if it's a wooden board instead of a belt?  Is it then abuse?   What if dear old dad's a teacher and Marv is not his son.  Abuse or discipline?   What if Marv has a learning disorder and failed a test and that's what's on his list of crimes.  Abuse?

I'm not interested in a discussion of spanking vs. not spanking children as a form of parenting.  For the record, I disagree with it personally and think that hitting a child for any reason is both wrong and a form of short-term fear-based behavior modification that denies basic human rights and causes long term problems.  But, I don't see the above story as 'spanking' anyway.

Hitting someone smaller than myself with a leather belt until they cry or my arm is tired while they pose for me in the most humiliating situation I can think of is not 'spanking,'  it's an intentional beating.

I define this as abuse, and frankly, if dear old dad treated anyone else like he'd treated Marv, I wouldn't even have to define it, the penal code would do that for me; it's assault, possibly aggravated assault as I'm pretty sure that a leather belt would be construed as a weapon.  But, dear old dad didn't attack an adult on a regular basis with a weapon, only his child, and that somehow doesn't qualify as abuse?

So this story begs me to ask the questions and I hope you'll sound off in the comments or on your own blogs with a link to this one:
What is abuse?  As we're mostly ACoN's here, specifically, what defines abuse of a child?  Is that different from abuse of an adult, and if so, how?   Physical, emotional, verbal, spiritual, sexual; whatever aspect you think you can define, I hope you will.

Love,
Vanci