Comprehensive Analysis of The Concept of Child Abuse: A Critical Appraisal

Abstract

Throughout the history of mankind, children have only sometimes been spared to indignities, cruelties, and horrors that human beings so often inflict upon each other. At various times, in various places, children have been abandoned, starved, beaten, enslaved, sexually assaulted, and put to death. One such horror- child abuse – have become serious social problems in the united states and in some other industrialized societies, yet it occurs infrequently or not at all in many of the world’s societies. Child abuse seem’ s to increase in situations of rapid socio- cultural change, urban migration, family disorganization, and the like, no clear cut set of prognostic variables has been identified. Indeed, it seems that factors that predict child abuse in one society will not be predictive in another. Only active public and professional concerns led to the emergence of the truer picture of all forms of the child abuse and neglect: physical, sexual, emotional, and failure to thrive owing to maternal deprivation. The present paper is an attempt to make a comprehensive analysis and study of child abuse which is existing in different form and how they have been addressed in different existing legislation and government policies.