Self-Guided+project

=What is Child Abuse and how can we prevent it?=


 * Video about child abuse: **

media type="youtube" key="JI2Ko5cBP4Q" height="385" width="640" Research Summery: **

Child abuse has been a serious problem for a very long time. Many abusers don’t know that they are maltreating the child due to their lack of knowledge. Because of that I intended to do this research on child abuse, its definitions, types, causes and effects to learn myself and teach other people about it and how it could be prevented. There are three types of child abuse: neglect, sexual abuse, and emotional/psychological abuse and physical abuse. There are many reasons that will be shown in this essay to why children are being abused and many ways to prevent child abuse. First people need to learn what child abuse is defined as. After my research I came up with my own definition. I defined child abuse as treating a young human that is below the age of full physical development or legal age with cruelty of violence regularly and/or repeatedly. But I also found definitions online for it and the one I liked best said “as Harm or threatened harm to a child's health or welfare that occurs through nonaccidental physical or mental injury, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, types or maltreatment, by a parent, a legal guardian, or any other person responsible for the child's health or welfare, or by a teacher, a teacher's aide, or a member of the clergy.” Now that I have defined child abuse I will show the different types of child abuse. There are four main forms of child abuse, which are emotional child abuse, sexual abuse, child neglect, and physical child abuse. First emotional child abuse is when the child receives constant criticism, shaming, and humiliating, gets called names, undergo comments like “You are worthless” or “you are no good” and undergoing frequent yelling and threatening. This type of child abuse could affect the child’s mentality or way of thinking and make him/her feel like they are worthless, can give them social difficulties, anxiety and many more problems once they are older. Sexual child abuse could also be very harmful to the psychology of the child and might make it difficult for them to have intimate relationships once they are older. Sexual abuse is the act of a person that forces, persuades or threatens a child to have any form of sexual contact or engagement in any type of sexual activity. It specifically hard to identify because of all the shame and guilt the abused child ends up with because they might start to feel like they brought it upon themselves or the fear that others wont listen to them, be angry with them or that they would get in trouble. The third and most common type of child abuse is child neglect. Child neglect is when the parent or guardian is unable to provide the child of basic needs like sufficient amounts of food to hygiene to supervision to clothing. Children do learn in the end to take care of themselves on their own, but it still affects them psychologically when it might not show. The final type of child abuse is physical child abuse. Physical harm or injury to child is what is involved with physical abuse. Usually the cause is a severe form of discipline where the parents or guardians hurt their children in an attempt to “teach their children a lesson” or more uncommonly it might be a deliberate effort to hurt the child for whatever reason they might have. This could eventually lead to poor physical health and brain development. There are many reasons to why the children are undergoing the previously mentioned types of abuse from either their guardians or parents or sometimes even teachers and many more. The reasons to why children are being abused could be one of the following: Being involved in an abusive relationship with intimate partner, child having disabilities or mental retardation, being depressed or mentally sick, experiencing abuse as children, having the influence of poverty, distress, stress and unemployment, having poor communication and/or relationships between the parents and the children, having a disorganized or a desolating family and there could be many more reasons to why this is happening. Finally people might wonder how child abuse could be prevented. Some of the many suggested ways to prevent this crisis is to educate new parents on this topic, support child abuse prevention programs and ask for help when needed.


 * EBSCO Summaries: **