ASSESSMENT OF THE FACTORS RESPONSIBLE FOR CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT IN NIGERIA
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
It has been the general assumption that children with reasonable physical care would grow into normal happy adulthood. But scientific investigations of psychologists, sociologist and psychiatrists regarding personality development has uncovered the greater importance of the growing up and its lasting effects on the total personality of a person. Adult personality has its root in childhood. What we can do as adult is largely determined by ways in which we were allowed into experience inevitable events of childhood.
Thus the aim of this research work is to shed more light on the issue of child abuse and neglect in Kaduna South Local Government of Kaduna State.
A child is neglected when he lacks continues physical and emotional contact with his mother. Children under this category are those may be due to lose of mother or both parents or the separation of both parents, thus child may be sent to nursery school or orphanages with many children which makes it difficult for special individual attention to be rendered to each child. Those children are therefore brought up by stranger which could be changed at different times due to the shift of their study.
Child abuse on the other hand can be defined as the portion of harm to children that result from human action or in action that is prescribed, proximate and preventable. The definition recognizes that such harm is no accident but something perpetrated on children by others, usually intestinally and that the actors inflicting this harm do not enjoy society approval. It is also point out that abuse generally come from the child immediate environment and that it is preventable child neglect is a passive form of maltreatment or abuse UNICEF (1986).