NCJ Number
140489
Journal
Child Abuse and Neglect Volume: 16 Issue: 6 Dated: (November-December 1992) Pages: 887-908
Date Published
1992
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This study assessed the perceptions and opinions of Indian nationals with regard to child abuse and attempted to determine whether the assessment of seriousness vary with the nature of the abuse described, whether people from human service professions and nonhuman service groups agreed about the seriousness of different forms of child abuse, and how Indians and Americans compared in their perceptions.
Abstract
Three groups of people -- social workers, other human service professionals, and lay people -- were interviewed in three metropolitan cities in India. Two questionnaires consisting of several categories of vignettes including cleanliness, clothing, drug and alcohol use, educational neglect, emotional neglect, fostering delinquency, housing, medical neglect, nutrition, parental sexual mores, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and supervision were used to assess their perceptions. The findings showed that perceived seriousness of child abuse would vary with the nature of the abuse; child prostitution and child beggary received the highest overall rankings, due to the efforts of social welfare movements in India to ban such practices. While sexual abuse was considered highly abusive, physical abuse was ranked relatively low. In general, all three groups of respondents agreed on their perceptions of the seriousness of child abuse. However, in the U.S. sample, non-human service professionals reacted much more strongly than did the American social workers and other human services professionals. This research provided some interesting insights into cross-cultural perceptions regarding child abuse and neglect. 3 tables and 59 references