Abstract
Introduction: Girl-child’s sexual and psycho-social abuse is an important social problem worldwide which affects the physical, mental, psychological health of a girl-child, these incidences occurs in homes, families, schools, communities, and other places where girl-child should feel safe. Purpose: This paper was designed to investigate the incidence of sexual and psycho-social abuse of girl child in Birnin Kebbi and Jega towns. Two hypotheses were raised to guide the study. Methodology: Descriptive survey design was employed in the study. The population of the study comprised of the entire SSSII students from eight public girls secondary schools in Birnin Kebbi and Jega towns. A sample of 300 students was drawn from the population of 3,017. Stratified random sampling was used to determine the sample size of each school in the quantitative approach. Simple random sampling was used to select the actual students that participated in the study. Girl Child Abuse Questionnaire (GCAQ) was adopted to collect the data. Experts in the relevant field validated the instrument, while the reliability coefficient was established using Cronbach Alpha at coefficient of 0.79. Results/Findings: Based on the result of the study, significant difference existed in hypotheses 1-2. The study found that Birnin Kebbi town is more prone to abuse than Jega town. Recommendations: It was recommended that parents should discipline children with love in a manner consistent with the child’s human dignity so as to avoid the rate at which girls are involved in sexual assault and sexual abuse.
Highlights
Girl-child’s sexual and psycho-social abuse is an important social problem worldwide which affects the physical, mental, psychological health of a girlchild, these incidences occurs in homes, families, schools, communities, and other places where girl-child should feel safe
The results of the t-test statistics in table 1 revealed that, significant difference existed between Birnin Kebbi and Jega towns in the level of incidence of sexual girl child abuse
This implies that the mean incidence of sexual girl child abuse of 46.510 and 45.290 for Birnin Kebbi and Jega towns respectively showed that Birnin Kebbi town had higher incidence of sexual girl child abuse than Jega town
Summary
Girl-child’s sexual and psycho-social abuse is an important social problem worldwide which affects the physical, mental, psychological health of a girlchild, these incidences occurs in homes, families, schools, communities, and other places where girl-child should feel safe. Purpose: This paper was designed to investigate the incidence of sexual and psychosocial abuse of girl child in Birnin Kebbi and Jega towns. The population of the study comprised of the entire SSSII students from eight public girls secondary schools in Birnin Kebbi and Jega towns. The term Girl child will be used to mean a young female (married or unmarried) between the ages of 11-18 years. Danjuma (2016) added that a girl-child is a female child that is within the age of 0 – 18 years of school age, married or unmarried and that is under the care of a husband, parent or a guardian. Gelles (2003) stated that the term child abuse caused a wide range of behaviour from actual physical assault by parents or other adult caretakers to neglect of child basic needs. According to Warberton (2001) child abuse means treatment which causes actual harm, or places the child at risk of such harm, such as illtreatment and failure to act to protect acts of commission (abuse) or omission (neglect)
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