Childhood is the most critical period in human development. It influences the formation of one's basic personality and is the basis of all the behaviors in one's future. The experience of abuse in this period has a consistent influence on the interper...
Childhood is the most critical period in human development. It influences the formation of one's basic personality and is the basis of all the behaviors in one's future. The experience of abuse in this period has a consistent influence on the interpersonal relationships and social life in the forthcoming stages.
In korea, however, there is no sufficient consciousness of Child abuse yet. In addition, despite of all the negative reports of the research findings about it, Child abuse has been taken for granted socially and culturally in the name of discipline. It gives physical, psychological, and emotional difficulties to the victimized children. The problems in the children's maladaptation have a negative influence not only one their growth but also on their social adaptation when they become adults.
The present study attempts to consider the degree of abuse committed by the parents according to its types, and the degree of the children's adaptation according to the domains of their life. It also attempts to examine the negative effects of parental abuse to the children's adaptation to their everyday life.
Ultimately, this study has a purpose of proposing a basic data required for enhancing the ability of the victimized children to adapt to their life.
After the factor analysis carried out based on the pilot study, a survey using a structured questionnaire was conducted to 192 elementary school students selected by means of cluster sampling from three classes in three elementary schools(one class for one school), located in three different areas in Kang-Hwa-Gun. Collected data was processed using the SPSS(Statistical Package for Social Sciences) for windows ver. 10. 0 To determine the gender-specific differences in the degree of child abuse experiences and the differences in the life adaptation between the abused and non-abused children, independent sample t-test was used. Additionally, multiple regression analysis and frequency analysis were used in examining the effects of child abuse on the victim's adaptation to everyday life.
The variables of parental abuse were set to be physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect, while those of children's life adaptation, sociality, self-esteem, teacher relations, friend relations, academic, achievement, and home life.
The result of the study is as follows:
First, in case of physical abuse, more boys than girls seem to experience child abuse.
Second, though all the types of parental abuse have an influence on the children's life adaptation, neglect has the most powerful effect on it.
Interestingly, unlike the cases of physical or emotional abuse, in terms of neglect, the children experiencing no abuse seem to have more difficulties in adapting to life than the abused ones. The reason may be that parents' ignorant or wrong attitudes toward child rearing, such as overprotectiveness, make the children to have weak mental power and vitality and thus decrease their independence.
Third, abused children show significant results in all the variables of life adaptation, which demonstrates that abuse affects their adaptiveness.
Based on these findings, this study confirmed that parental abuse had an influence on the children's adaptation to their daily life, and that abuse could be a predictor of children's adaptiveness.
Based on the concrete analysis of the above result, the following measures are recommended as the welfare interventions for helping the abused children to adapt to their life.
First, social welfare practices at the individual level should be provided to the children suffering from abuse; the degree of adaptiveness should be diagnosed in the abused children and then priority should be placed in the reinforcement of in individual protection, and, therapeutic interventions should be applied to both abusive parents and their children.
Second, because child abuse has not been emerged as a big social problem to date, social efforts should be made on the primary prevention. And, then, the efforts promoting the improvement of parents child-rearing attitudes or parent education should be encouraged.
Third, the policies or institutional services should be prepared to support the victimized children in maintaining their adaptiveness.