[6] The abuse can be inflicted with shoving, hitting, slapping, kicking, biting, pinching, scratching, and hair-pulling.
Even when sibling abuse is recognized it remains heavily under-reported, due to the lack of resources provided to families, such as child protective services and mandatory reporters.
[7] Professional childcare providers have considerably different definitions of the term, and lack a system to track reports.
Sibling physical abuse persists from childhood through adulthood, with prevalence rates varying across studies, though its intensity and frequency declines as the victim and/or perpetrator grow up.
Adults, such as the parents or professional care providers have difficulty differentiating between psychological aggression and abuse because it is difficult to identify when the balance of power is not evenly distributed.
Several researchers have found negative psychological, academic, and social consequences to be related to sibling aggression and abuse; however, causal inference requires more study.
[2] One study found that adult sibling abuse survivors have much higher rates of emotional cutoff (34%) with brothers and sisters than what is evident in the general population (<6%).
[16] Victims have been recorded to correlate pain and fear with sex, leading to long term issues with intimacy.
[citation needed] Weihe suggests that four criteria should be used to determine if questionable behavior is rivalry or abusive.
Third, one must determine if there is an "aspect of victimization" to the behavior: rivalry tends to be incident-specific, reciprocal, and obvious to others, while abuse is characterized by secrecy and an imbalance of power.
It includes negative and conflictual parent-child relationships,[16][22] parental hostility toward a child,[23][22] spousal abuse, partner conflict, marital conflict,[24][25][16][26][22] mother's marital dissatisfaction and negative emotional expressiveness,[27][22] maternal self-criticism,[28][29][30][22] financial stress,[31][32][22] low family cohesion, family disorganization and household chaos,[33][34][35][22] husband's losses of temper,[34][22] low maternal education,[36][22] and family triangulation.
[37][38][39][22] This category of risk factors associated with sibling abuse examines the parenting behavior of adult caregivers.
For offender children, known individual risk factors include lack of empathy for victims,[57][22] aggressive temperament,[58][22] lower or higher self-esteem than peers,[59][50][22] unmet personal needs for physical contact in emotion-deprived environments,[60][37][22] experience of victimization, including by siblings,[61][22] sibling caretaking of younger brothers and sisters,[62][63][22] and boredom.
[86] Jonathan Caspi identified several prevention methods for children and families, educators and practitioners, researchers, and the culture at large in Sibling Aggression: Assessment and Treatment (2012).
They include "extra precautions to ensure the victim's safety, such as locks on doors, increased adult supervision, and cooperation of parents, extended family members, and the community", "individual treatment for the victim and the offender, often with different clinicians possessing expertise in child abuse trauma", and "no conjoint sibling or family meetings with the offender until he or she has accepted full responsibility for the abuse and until the therapist is satisfied that the family can and will protect the victim from further abuse".
Cheyenne was abusive toward her two sisters, Maimiti and Raiatua, as well as towards Marlon Brando and Tarita, her parents, particularly her mother.
Tarita Teriipaia wrote a book in 2005, which revealed Cheyenne terrorized her own family, as a result of her suffering from schizophrenia.
[94] The French serial killer Guy Georges physically abused his adoptive elder sisters when he was 14, nearly killing them.
[95] In 2013, the Australian actor Hugh Jackman opened up about the physical and verbal abuse by his older brother.