The first time a mother hits a child it starts. If the child is lucky it gets no worse than that. If he is unlucky, like me, it escalates. First it's hitting that may or may not be justifiable, that warns a child about appropriate boundaries of behavior.
It can rapidly escalate if the mother does not take into account that it is normal for a child to test boundaries, to make mistakes, or to just simply not understand what is required of him. If the mother sees violence as the cure for all undesired behaviors, and does not see what is wrong with that philosophy, then she sees the child's lack of a proper response as something wrong with him that she can beat out of him. She finds herself beating him for every little transgression against her "rules", and if she isn't beating him, she is tearing him down psychologically. She has almost entirely cut out nurturing, and will only do it if it is at no cost to her. She even develops a pathological fear of doing anything that might nurture her child's development.
There are people who express contempt for those who cannot raise themselves properly without the loving support of at least one good parent. What's the word for these people? That's, right, they are idiots. A child who is less than five years old has to be given something to be able to grow and develop at all well.
Once a child has been treated to this, he can't believe in his mother or any other authority figure. Then when he gets into school, those who believe that they are authority figures see that he has problems with authority. So what do they do? They milk it to the max. He is their toy, their punching bag, their example of why their ability to manipulate and destroy is so desparately needed. He is pretty easy to manipulate into bad situations for various reasons. The chief reason, though, is because he is five, six, seven years old or so and it is absolutely normal for someone that age to be that easy to manipulate. This is true even without the fact that the manipulators can use pain and the threat of death to reinforce their manipulation.
Part of the manipulation is to magnify that child's faults in the eyes of others. A child who actually stabs one of his classmates with a knife is not considered dangerous if no one takes notice of it. Another child who wants a bully to leave him alone can be considered dangerous if he simply raises his voice and a so-called teacher decides that indicates that he might be violent.
The stages of disbelief start with the mother slapping a child in the face for some reason that might be justifiable. That takes a little bit of the possibility of belief away. Beating the child until he hyperventilates then keeping him in that state for a long, long time, taking him through a near-death experience and total loss of coherent brain function, erasing his sense of reality for an indeterminate period of time, then explaining to him what that was all about in a hysterical screaming voice while shaking him, that makes it really difficult to have any idea what the hell is going on, let alone understand what he's being told. It could erase belief, except that the experience is so far out of reality all this does is make the child feel as if his mother is a deadly threat to his existence.
Then of course there is the eventual revelation, if the child lives long enough, that the offenses for which the child is beaten are trivial or even non-existent. That's not just erosion, that's a portion of the foundation that has collapsed and taken a room with it. She just "felt like it" and that means it's right. Now it's the entire east wall. The child cannot know what thing she is going to "stop", or take away, or just how far he will be torn down at any time for any reason, and he's too young to even understand that it's PMS, not that it helps anyway because knowing that it's PMS doesn't stop her from doing it.
The schoolteachers pick up on the child's vulnerability and sense of rejection and exploit it to the fullest. When the child realizes that they are exploiting him for their emotional satisfaction, well, he realizes it. If he says anything about it he is subjected to some ruthless violence that his mother won't do anything about, she'll just tell him not to be "smart." She will blame him for the violence they do against him.
There can be no sense of reality when this goes on. At best the child has a secret self who steals moments of self-hood from his surroundings wherever he can find them, while knowing that if he is caught the adults will ruthlessly stamp that out. These activities can be as innocent as reading science fiction.