ISLAMABAD (Digital Post) The Overlooked Reality of Teacher-Perpetrated Emotional & Psychological Abuse

ISLAMABAD (Digital Post) When people think about teachers mistreating students, they often picture something physical like a slap, a hit, a raised hand. But research consistently shows that the most common form of harm from teachers isn’t physical at all. It’s emotional and psychological. And it doesn’t stop once students grow up; it continues to show up even among older, adult learners in colleges and universities, not just young children in primary school (Gusfre, Støen, & Fandrem, 2022).

Emotional and psychological mistreatment is harder to spot than physical abuse. There’s no bruise, no mark, nothing to point to as proof. That’s exactly why it tends to be so widespread: it can happen constantly, in small doses, without ever being labeled as a problem. A teacher who humiliates a student, mocks their intelligence, or uses their authority to intimidate rarely faces the same scrutiny as one who hits a student, even though the psychological damage can be just as serious, if not more so (Datta, Cornell, & Huang, 2017).

Across the research, this type of mistreatment shows up as:

• Making students feel stupid — mocking wrong answers, ridiculing a student in front of classmates, or openly questioning their intelligence. This is one of the most frequently reported forms of teacher mistreatment.
• Dismissing students and their ideas — ignoring their questions, refusing to take their input seriously, or excluding them from class discussion. Over time, this teaches students that their thoughts don’t matter.
• Misusing authority — using the natural power imbalance between teacher and student to control, intimidate, or punish, rather than to guide or teach.
• Threats, insults, and unfair treatment — targeting a student repeatedly with harsh comments, unequal treatment compared to peers, or comments meant to shame rather than correct.

Moreover, this pattern isn’t limited to children. Research on university and college-level students shows the same behaviors persist into adult education; professors and instructors belittling students’ abilities, dismissing their contributions, or using their position to intimidate rather than mentor. This challenges the common assumption that this is only a “childhood” or “K-12” issue that students simply grow out of once they become adults.

One of the most important findings in this area is that many teachers genuinely do not recognize their own behavior as harmful. Some teachers see belittling or intimidating behavior as simply “classroom management,” “tough love,” or “maintaining standards”; even when their own colleagues, watching the same behavior, see it as unfair or abusive (Hepburn, 2000; Zerillo & Osterman, 2011).
Because emotional abuse leaves no visible mark and is so often reframed as strictness or discipline, it rarely gets challenged, reported, or taken seriously, even when it’s happening constantly.