How Do Teachers Diagnosis and Percept Child Maltreatment?

Garrusi, Behshid, Safizadeh, Hossein, Arabnejad, Azadeh, Vesal, Mohaddese, Journal of Social Sciences

INTRODUCTION

Child abuse is a global problem and all communities are faced with various forms of it. This phenomenon can be investigated from physical, psychological and sexual aspects (1), (2). In many cases, the victims of child abuse cannot reveal the event due to various reasons. Since in most of the cases child abusers are among family members or close friends of the victim (3), the event can remain as a secret and consequently leads to serious injuries in both childhood and adulthood that are difficult to be compensated (4). Schools are important organizations for applying preventive interventions in regard to psychological health problems of children and teachers because of spending several hours with children and having close contact with them are among the most important sources for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of child abuse (5), (6). On the other hand, this close teacher-student relationship may cause students to feel more comfortable revealing their personal problems to their teachers. In different performed studies about teachers' capability in diagnosis and reporting this problem, it has been observed that in spite of higher rate of reporting child abuse cases by schools comparing to other institutions, only 84% of child abuse cases have been reported by schools (6), (7). Other studies have reported different rates in this regard. Various factors have been contributed to the insufficient rate of child abuse reporting by teachers, among them the most important is lack of related training courses for teachers in both their academic and on-job training programs (8), (2).

In most cases of child abuse, teachers potentially can act differently from others (9) and are capable of diagnosing both behavioral and physical signs of the event, while other involved groups such as physicians mostly can diagnose physical signs (2), (10), (11). The victims of child abuse have lower rate of self-confidence, social skills and educational success as well as more disciplinary problems that all these aspects can be detected by teachers better (12).

In Iran, from 2001, child abuse has changed from a personal crime to a public crime and all people can report child abuse cases to legal organizations. Since in Iran the reporting sources are not known well, the rate of child abuse reporting by teachers is not clear. But a few studies showed the rate of child maltreatment is high (13). The present study was carried out with the following aims:

* To determine the rate of knowledge and capability of teachers in diagnosing signs of child abuse

* To determine teachers' attitude toward child abuse

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The study was done in Kerman, the center of the largest province in Iran with a variety of ethnic populations. Participants …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: How Do Teachers Diagnosis and Percept Child Maltreatment?. Contributors: Garrusi, Behshid - Author, Safizadeh, Hossein - Author, Arabnejad, Azadeh - Author, Vesal, Mohaddese - Author. Journal title: Journal of Social Sciences. Volume: 3. Issue: 4 Publication date: October 2007. Page number: 245+. © 2008 Science Publications. COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale Group.

This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.