Child Abuse free essay sample

December 6th, 2011 Part D: Research Report Child abuse is a world-wide issue that is gradually increasing. I wanted to know how much target group, high school students male and female, know about this topic. So I conducted a survey to try and prove my hypothesis that high school students don’t have enough knowledge about child abuse. The method I used to gather my data was as I mentioned, conducting a survey. I randomly selected students from my school that fit in this age group to take part in my survey. The survey contained 10 general questions about child abuse to evaluate their knowledge. Students were asked to define in their opinion what they believed to be child abuse. That question was answered relatively well. Most people think that there is only one thing that can be considered as child abuse such as only beating the child or only sexually abusing the child but 80% of the students chose the answer that included each type of abuse-physical, verbal, emotional, neglect and sexual and not just one in particular. We will write a custom essay sample on Child Abuse or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page 1% of the students believed that child abuse is only physical and 8% believed it is only sexual. It is a fact that a child abuse cannot be identified based on their physical appearance or their social economic background. To my surprise, 22% of the 35 students thought otherwise. They thought that a child abuser could be identified just by looking at them but 77% knew that that wasn’t the case. 74% thought that child abuse is acknowledged as a serious issue but 25% didn’t agree. The students were asked if they thought that hitting a child as a form of discipline was acceptable. This is more or less based on each individual’s personal beliefs and morals but ideally, hitting is not the right way to go. 25% thought that physical means of disciple was acceptable and 54% didn’t. 20% thought that it all depends on the given circumstance. Here is a better representation: Surprisingly, 30/35 of the students don’t think that child abuse is being taken seriously enough. 5 of them thought it was. 83% don’t think that an abuser is aware of the impact that the abuse is having on the child which is very correct. In most cases, the abuser has no idea when impact the abuse has on the child but it often depends on each individual and the severity of the abuse. As shown above, most students believe that children don’t report child abuse concerns about they are afraid that they will get into more trouble and they also don’t think anyone will believe them which is very accurate. I was very pleased to see that 100% of the students knew that children didn’t always report abuse but I was hoping that more people would report abuse if they knew about it. That’s just my personal opinion. Everyone is entitled to their own honest opinion. Lastly, the students were asked if they thought that people who knew about a child being abused but did nothing should also be blamed and almost all of them said yes. Meanwhile, not all of them said that they would report abuse if they knew about it. In conclusion, my hypothesis was not entirely correct but with that being said, I believe that high school students should be more educated about child abuse and abuse in general. I did not really come across many challenges in this process because everyone who participated in my survey answered all questions honestly and completely. Their cooperation is well appreciated.