Prevalence of Child Abuse and Correlations with Family Factors Among Elementary School-aged Children

Abstract

Background: Child abuse is a significant health and social problem. Different social and family factors have effects on child abuse. Objectives: This study was carried out to determine the prevalence of child abuse in three domains of physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect among a sample of elementary school children in Iran. Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, a total of 400 elementary school children were selected through multistage cluster sampling from Shahroud, Iran, and assessed for all child abuse domains, except for sexual abuse, using a validated self-administered Persian questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed with SPSS, using descriptive statistics, t-test, chi-square test, Fisher's exact test, and multiple linear regression analysis (P ≤ 0.05). Results: The mean age of the participants was 10.83 years (SD = 1.9). Overall, 63.8%, 27%, and 90.3% of children reported emotional abuse, physical abuse, and neglect, respectively. There were significant associations between the mother’s employment status and neglect (P < 0.001), father’s education and physical child abuse (P = 0.03), and father’s smoking and emotional child abuse (P < 0.001). The results showed that lower levels of family socioeconomic status had significant effects on neglect (P = 0.006) and emotional child abuse (P = 0.003). Conclusions: Among the studied children, 73.8% declared at least one type of child abuse. It seems that the prevalence of neglect increased among school-aged children compared to previous studies from Iran. The low socioeconomic status of the family is significantly related to child abuse. Family physicians and school counselors play important roles in identifying and reporting child abuse and neglect. Therefore, they should be more involved in the prevention of child abuse.