You miss-read (or didn't read) the article if that's your take-away. It's saying the long-term effects can be roughly the same. It's not equivocating the actions themselves.

They're not equivocating the malice of verbal abuse vs. sexual abuse. They are equivocating the damage this kind of abuse can do to children, which their research supports. There's no reason to take offense as if they were taking a stand on the non-severity child sexual abuse, which they are not.

Verbal abuse when I was growing up was backed up with the threat of physical abuse. And having been bit and hit by my dad, and seeing my mom and older brother hit by my dad, those verbal threats carried a lot of weight.

I've walked on eggshells around my dad and every man that reminded me of him my whole life. It's affected my relationships and made it impossible to hold down a job as most bosses have the same authoritarian streak my dad did.

So yeah, verbal abuse is damaging. Rather it's equivalent to other forms of abuse I can't say. But it took me 44 years and a skilled emdr therapist to finally heal enough that I don't feel overwhelmed whenever I get emotional.

And for much of the last fifteen years I've been trying to find a therapist that took my trauma seriously and knew how to help me with it. So many misdiagnosis (anxiety, substance use, and depression were symptoms, but not the diagnosis that helped). Many suicide attempts. Many psych meds that didn't help. Many many years feeling unheard by the medical establishment.

So yeah, it's damaging.

Why?

I will say, verbal abuse is harder to pinpoint.

In some ways, it's easier to have a source of trauma to point to and say "that's the cause," so you can address and treat it.

I was verbally abused. My inner dialogue was one of critisism, guilt and shame, that I didn't realize until well into adulthood. I thought that was how everyone talked to themselves.

If I had been physically abused, I would have known about it. Much less insidious to the mind.

E: Was also just thinking about triggers. If you were a victim of physical trauma, your triggers might be very obvious. With verbal trauma, for me anyway, they were much less obvious. To think back, I went years and years having fight or flight reactions for no obvious reason, often manifested as anxiety or poor impulse control, wasted so many days just feeling anxious instead of working on myself. One trigger for me is loud voices. Had no idea until well into adulthood things started making sense. Damn near had a panic attack one day when a chef started yelling at the line cooks while I was waiting for my order.

While what you and I feel doesn't matter much, we truly need a scientific study of this. Oh, wait! That's what this was. Please defer to objective consensus...