SOCIO-STRUCTURAL AND CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF EMOTIONAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN IN FAMILIES IN RURAL AREAS

Abstract

Emotional abuse against a child in the family can negatively affect his or her physical, mental, spiritual, moral, as well as social development. The purpose of this paper is to analyze socio-structural and cultural determinants of emotional abuse against children in rural areas, given that these groups of determinants differ in the conditions under which urban and rural abuse is more or less likely to occur. Different behaviors can be classified under emotional abuse – rejection, degradation, intimidation, different discriminatory practices, and certainly denial of emotional response. The methods of theoretical content analysis with basic methods of concretization and specialization, normative, comparative method, as well as basic quantitative analysis of tabulated data are applied in this paper. The expected results of the research should give a clearer picture of the differences in socio-structural and cultural treatment of activities that can be considered emotional abuse against children in rural areas, compared to urban areas. It is also interesting to analyze comparative data on the prevalence of emotional abuse against children in families in the Balkan region. Comparing the experiences of urban and rural areas, this paper contributes to a clearer picture of the conditionality of emotional abuse against children in rural areas and makes overarching recommendations to prevent the basic socio-structural and cultural determinants and factors in this domain.