Background: Clinical studies to establish the impacts of child abuse and child neglect are in no shortage in the modern world. These studies have managed to explain that the effects of childhood abuse or neglect span far longer than expected with some longitudinal studies indicating that the effects can last for 50 years or more. However, very little has been done to understand the perspectives of parents and adults in general over childhood abuse and neglect. The present study aims at exploring and describing perspectives of adults regarding child abuse of different types and estimating the severity as perceived by respondents.
Methodology: This cross-sectional study was conducted among adult Saudi population to describe and assess the adult awareness about different types of child abuse, data were collected by using a pretested close-ended self-administered online survey and collected data were analyzed using statistical package for social sciences software program Ver. 24.
Results: Four hundred fifty four respondents participated in this study, where 343 (75.6%) were female while the rest 111 were male (24.4%). About 135 (29.7%) of the respondents aged between 21 and 30 years, while 28.6% of the respondents indicated they had been abused as children. On average, the people think it is a severe abuse to burn children with cigaretteĀ95% CI (4.26, 4.55). The majority of the respondents thought that the best approach is family education over child abuse 161/454 (35.5%), while only 67 (14.8%) were of the opinion that rehabilitation is the best method of protecting child against abuse.
Conclusions: In general, people in Saudi Arabia strongly condemn child abuse and neglect of any kind, with the prevalence of knowledge to prevent children against abuse being on average high.
Key words: Adult awareness, child abuse, child neglect, Saudi Arabia
|
