Correlation between Child Abuse and School Refusal among Primary School Children in Benha City

Abstract

Child abuse is a serious problem that results in devastating and long lasting damage to individual and community at large. Child abuse is a global issue affects children of all ages, gender, races, and ethnicities and in varied socio economic classes linked to causes of child morbidity, mortality, school refusal and educational dropout. Aim of the study: This study aimed to identify the correlation between child abuse and school refusal among primary school children in Benha City, Qaliubya Governorate. Sample: The study sample consisted of 400 students from 5th and 6th grade of education from Alshahid Abdal-Monem Riad School. Research Design: A descriptive correlational design was utilized in this study. Tools: In this study two tools were used for data collection: I) a structured interviewing questionnaire included socio-demographic data of the studied students and their parents as well as questionnaire about different types of child abuse. II) School Refusal Assessment Scale. Results: The results revealed that, near to half of the studied children have moderate level of child abuse from their family, near to half have high level of child abuse from school and less than half of them have mild level of school refusal behavior. Also, there was a highly statistically positive correlation between total child abuse and total school refusal scales among primary school children in Benha city. Conclusion: The study concluded that studied children exposed to child abuse from family, school, have exposed to mild level of school refusal and there was a highly statistically positive correlation between total child abuse and total school refusal scales among primary school children in Benha city. Recommendations: Therapeutic guidance programs should be prepared for children who exposed to child abuse or have school refusal. Psycho-educational programs should be integrated as nursing intervention for students and their parents to enhance their psychological wellbeing as well as reducing school refusal . ـــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ