physical abuse
physical cruelty

A related theme is the physical cruelty of traditional Chinese "justice."

The prisoners tell harrowing stories of physical cruelty and pointless humiliations.

We cannot be passive onlookers and fail these masses of people who are being subjected to mental and physical cruelty.

It's amazing enough for adults to endure severe mental and physical cruelty and emerge with their sense of self intact.

'They will be useful for children giving evidence for abuse cases in the widest sense, from sexual abuse to physical cruelty,' he said.

The physical cruelty of the tormentors and the pain of Christ's sufferings had also become more overt in their expression over time.

Langley told me it looked to him as though Ralph Ignatowski had endured just about every variety of physical cruelty imaginable.

Beyond the physical cruelty and lost youth, sub-Saharan Africa's child laborers are social and economic millstones on a region that can ill afford them.

The 1968 Act widened the reasons for divorce from adultery to include mental or physical cruelty, desertion, separation for three years or having an imprisoned spouse.

In addition to physical cruelty, there is every evidence that almost all the women living in Afghanistan are subject to psychological pressures which are leading them to depression and suicide.

Court records show that Mr. Aris subjected his wife to extreme physical cruelty, including beatings, over several years and threatened to kill her or other family members if she left him.

Has used physical cruelty or violence for the purpose of establishing dominance in a relationship (not merely to achieve some noninterpersonal goal, such as striking someone in order to rob him or her)

And as the living death of Ottoman Turkish rule began to seep in, with its physical cruelty, economic exploitation, and barren intellectual life, the Serbs perverted this myth of noble sacrifice.

The marriage was unhappy, reportedly due to Stokes's temper and physical cruelty, and when it was dissolved by divorce in 1900, she received a settlement of nearly two million dollars, a record for the time.

Depending on the prevailing doctrine on judicial punishment and penal harm, psychological and/or physical cruelty may be a conscious intent of prison farm labor, and not just an inevitable but unintended collateral effect.

Although Wuthering Heights is now widely regarded as a classic of English literature, it received mixed reviews when first published, and was considered controversial because its depiction of mental and physical cruelty was so unusually stark.

Yet Murry Wilson's emotional penury and physical cruelty - reminiscent of R. Crumb's father in the documentary "Crumb" - did not make Brian a musical prodigy, nor did it prevent him from becoming a musical innovator.

And if part of the opposition to the death penalty springs from its physical cruelty, as it surely should, then how exactly can many death-penalty opponents support what some activists have called "partial-birth abortion," a procedure that makes the electric chair seem positively comfy?

Reviewing her memoir, "Happy Days," in The New York Times Book Review, Delia Ephron called it "heartbreaking," adding: "There is no physical cruelty in this tale, just the awesome power of withheld love."

Mrs. Walters, reached by telephone, told of interviews with two teen-agers who, she said, described physical cruelty to children at foster care homes as well as sexual abuse of teen-agers at parties in Omaha, New York, Chicago and Washington.

Adults whose childhood was rife with alcoholism, brutality, drugs, molestation, incest, physical cruelty or emotional abuse will inflict abuse on their children because they have not been shown any other way - and they themselves have denied the pain the abuse caused them.

It was horrific cases of brides set ablaze in dowry disputes that galvanized the Indian women's movement two decades ago and led to criminal laws to punish guilty husbands and in-laws, not only in dowry-related cases but for other physical cruelty to wives.

"The Jew," Jom Tob Azulay's frustratingly sketchy portrait of the 18th-century Portuguese playwright Antonio Jose da Silva, who was a victim of the Inquisition, has scenes of physical cruelty visited on Jewish prisoners that will make your blood run cold.