My personal belief is if a child is beaten and / or verbally abused they grow up to be mental cases like me.

Can come back to haunt you decades later.

the greater the number of adverse childhood events, the worse mental AND physical health is likely to be.

Refer to Felitti and Adverse Childhood Events (ACE score).

for me, every day is a challenge for good or ill. I'll never be considered "normal" but I have friends and a social life of sorts... I don't think I'm a mental case. At least I try not to be.

Being sexually abused at 4 STILL affects me

64 years old, still occasionally dream about it all. Still cannot often function as well as I should in a crowd. Thanks mom and dad, I hope we helped relieve you of your own frustrations.

...that creates Avoidant Personality Disorder, not Complex PTSD.

I had the support of family, but being tortured by peers wasn't exactly fun and left scars. Still, I count my blessings that my nightmares and night terrors are from adulthood trauma. Even if it totally reinforced trust issues with peers and made me isolate socially even worse.

I suffered some (relative mild) sexual abuse (I call it mild because I was not entirely unwilling in any of the cases ... one might say I was interested in sexual activity from a very young age ... it was still inappropriate on their part though), but also a whole lot of 'peer abuse' and bullying (with one older boy, I submitted sexually, repeatedly and against my actual 'orientation', just to have a big, strong friend who'd protect me from bullies at school), and I can you absolutely without question the abuse dealt to me by other children was more damaging to my psyche, well-being and self-confidence than any of the sexual-related 'happenings' with people mature enough to have known better.

I don't have nightmares about the sex, I do about the bullying, put it that way.

I am a male though and I think that often makes a difference in these sorts of matters ...