CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background to the Study
All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love and articulate their needs and feelings for their self protection. Although growing up can be difficult, most children and young people receive the love and care they need to develop into healthy, happy, young adults. In their development, children need the respect and protection of adults who take care of them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to become oriented in the world. But some children are hurt, neglected and used by adults or other children. Young children may not be aware that what is happening to them is abuse.
Abuse can mean different things to different children, and can happen once or many times during childhood. It has been observed that such abuse on children has adverse effect on their academic and intellectual performance. (Herbert, 1990) child abuse is any behavior directed towards a child by a parent, a guardian, other family members or another adult that endangers or impairs a child’s physical or emotional health or development. Child abuse can take place either as a physical abuse, Sexual abuse, Emotional abuse or Neglect.
A child is physical abused when he/she is hurt or injured by parent or other people. This could be by hitting, kicking, beaten by objects, throwing and shaking of children and can cause pains, cuts, brushes broken bone and sometimes even death.
Sexual abuse is when children are forced or persuaded into sexual acts or situations by others. Children might be encouraged to look at pornographic pictures, be harassed by sexual suggestion or comments, be touched sexually or forced to have sex against their wishes, emotionally children are abused when they are not given love, approval or acceptance.
Childhood maltreatment potentially has major economic implications for Nigeria schools and for their students. Take for instance a conservative estimates suggest that at least 8 percent of U.S. children experience sexual abuse before age 18, while 17 percent experience physical abuse and 18 percent experience physical neglect (Flisher, Kramer, Hoven, Greenwald, Alegria, Bird, et al, 1997, Gorey & Leslie, 1997).
Childhood maltreatment and aversive parenting practices, in general, has the potential to delay the academic progress of students (Shonk & Cicchehi, 2001). It therefore has the potential to undermine schools’ ability to satisfy standards of school progress entailed in the no child left behind legislation (U. S. Department of Education, 2005), putting them at risk for loss of federal funding. It also has the potential to adversely affect students’ economic outcomes in adulthood, via its impact on achievement in middle and high school (Cawley, Heckman, & Vytlacil, 2001; Heckman & Rubinstein, 2001).
Although its potential impact is large, evidence of causal effects of abuse on children’s longer term outcomes in school is generally lacking. The current state of evidence for a link between childhood abuse (physical and sexual abuse or neglect) and school performance is limited to negative associations between abuse and school performance. On average, children who are abused receive lower ratings of performance from their school teachers, score lower on cognitive assessments and standardized tests of academic achievement, obtain lower grades and get suspended from school and retained in grade more frequently (Erickson, Egeland, & piñata, 1989; Eckenrode, Laird, & Doris, 1993; Kurtz, Gaudin, Wodarski, & Howing, 1993; Kendall- Tackett & Eckenrode, 1996; Rowe & Eckenrode, 1999; Shonk & Cicchehi, 2001). Abused children are also prone to difficulty in forming new relationship with peers and adults and in adapting to norms of social behaviour (Shields, Cicchtti & Ryan, 1994; Toth & Cicchtti 1996). Although these examples of negative associations between abuse and school performance are suggestive of causal effects, they could be spuriously driven by unmeasured factors in families or neighborhoods that are themselves correlated with worse academic outcomes among children (Todd & Wolpin, 2003).