SECOND OPINION: Four-year-old Paul was a casualty of a war, not a front-line victim of bombs and bullets but still a casualty. He was caught in the emotional crossfire of the breakdown of his parents' marriage and his injuries presented in the form of nightmares, bedwetting and a refusal to go to school.
When asked to express his greatest fear through painting, Paul covered the page with a dark, swirling, sinister-looking circle. This, it emerged, was a puddle of water and Paul's greatest fear was that he would fall into it.
His unconscious had crystalised his terror of emotional abandonment into the puddle of water and, irrational as his fear of a puddle a few inches deep seemed to adults, for him it represented walking over the edge of the earth into emotional annihilation. The complexity of Paul's inner world is typical of the wounds inflicted on children when the adults in their lives are unable to provide their basic need for security.
While we must acknowledge the enormous progress made in the recognition of the needs and rights of children - at least in some parts of the world - we now have to move beyond our focus on the physical welfare of the child and start taking seriously the cost of our neglect of the inner world of the child.
And while our child protection guidelines do include emotional abuse in the definition of abuse, together with physical injuries, severe neglect and sexual abuse, the reality is that it is the sexual abuse of children which has dismayed us most and dominated our thinking over the past 25 years. This has eclipsed the emotional abuse of children as a focus for our concern.
The emotional abuse of a child may leave no physical marks, but it has a severe impact on the capacity of the next generation to function as fully integrated adults. Our failure to understand the emotional world of children will result in adults who perpetuate a cycle in which the emotional needs of the child take second place to the needs of the adult, with sometimes tragic consequences.
We are all familiar with the not-so-subtle evidence of the damage done to the adult who blithely asserts that beating children does them no harm because: "Look at me, I was beaten and I am fine."
The inner world of the child is also ignored by many adults, who long ago learned as children to cut themselves off from their own feelings. This enables adults to allow the louder demands of their own needs, particularly during times of stress, to dominate. This enables parents who protest their love for their child to be oblivious to their inability to provide their child with that fundamental need of a relationship with adults that is founded on not only love but security, trust and protection.
In the absence of this need being met, many children simply give up, retreat and bury the painful feelings. They bury them so deeply that they never retrieve them but in later life they act out their loss in their inability to respond appropriately as adults to the needs of children. And so the cycle continues.
This is not to say that it is possible to protect children from the reality of evil in the world. Children know instinctively that such evil exists. They come to terms with it at a fantasy level through fairy tales peopled by wicked witches, wolves and monsters to be defeated.
This they are able to do within a safety net provided by stable, emotionally available adults. Problems arise when adults move the "bogey man" from the fantasy level into real life and expect the child to deal with it at this real level.
This is best illustrated by anecdotal evidence from the UK when children's services had to deal with the emotional distress of children who couldn't make sense of the experience of being brought on protest marches against paedophiles.
These protests arose out of a tabloid press "name and shame" campaign, following the tragic murder of Sarah Payne.
Here, the children were not protected from the fear of their parents, a legitimate fear after the murder of a child, but too heavy a burden for a child's mind. Children need to feel secure in the capacity of the adults in their lives to face problems with strength and courage.
They are aware of their unequal place in society and their vulnerability. It is therefore the most cruel of paradoxes that a child's emotional needs can be sacrificed under the guise of protecting the child, or of defending their rights.
Our ambivalence in this area was demonstrated closer to home in the Holy Cross School conflict in Belfast a few years ago.
Here, the injustice of the children being deprived of their basic right to walk to school without intimidation resulted in the children being placed in the front line of a gauntlet of sectarian abuse and hatred.
The image of the terrified faces of the children at the time left no doubt about the fear experienced by them. Again, the adults believed that what they were doing was ultimately for the good of the children. These parents reacted angrily to any suggestion that while confronting such intimidation and bullying was a necessary task for adults, it was something that children needed to be protected from.
The challenge for us now is to look more closely at how often our children's emotional needs take second place to the demands of our own needs.
Olive Travers is a clinical psychologist working in the north west.