Forms of child abuse prevalent in my locality by @gracyakan

It my pleasure to be here again and met with everyone especially our kids, and thanks to our amazing community for organizing this contest because this will help caregivers and out noble kids to be alert and know how to protect themselves from abuse of any form.

WHAT IS CHILD ABUSE ?

Child abuse is the way of treating a child badly or purposeful harm to a child under 18 years of age.

FORMS OF CHILD ABUSE I KNOW THAT ARE PREVALENT IN MY LOCALITY

1. PHYSICAL ABUSE : when a caregiver or anyone hurt or injures a child's body by hitting
   the child hard with hand or use something like belt, rod, fire, pushing, choking, punching, painful grabbing and pinching, knocking, kicking and stoning, hard labour, Hawking, etc. All this can cause pains to the child.

2. SEXUAL ABUSE : is having sexual contact or sexual activities like touching sexual organs, taking about sexual act, and sharing sexual photos between an adult and a child under 18years of age. It could be forcefully, pressured, or persuaded by giving gift and threatened so that the child will not tell anyone.

3. NEGLEGENCE : is when an adult refuse to do what should be done to take care of a child. By not giving the child food, housing, clothing, medical care, education/schooling.

4. EMOTIONAL ABUSE : This happens when an adults judge, threaten, put down or reject a child, show no love and these makes a child feels bad about themselves or worthless.

5. SUBSTANCE ABUSE : This happens when adults takes hard drugs or drink much alcohol, these can make adults to abuse a child in the aforementioned ways thereby puting the child life in danger.

6. MEDICAL ABUSE : when adult caregivers give a child too much medical care, such as medicines, appointments, surgeries, or lab tests that are not needed and also make a child drink alcohol or illegal drugs, adults selling illegal drugs in the presence of a child, a pregnant woman taking illegal drugs is abusing the baby inside her womb.

7. CHILD TRAFFICKING : kidnapping a child away from the parents for money or ritual purpose.

THE MALE OR FEMALE CHILD WHO IS AT RISK THE MOST?

Any child can be abuse no matter the gender, male child can be abuse sexually, physically, emotionally, medically, and neglected etc just like female child. So both male and female child are at risk.

WHAT EFFECT CAN ABUSE HAVE ON THE KIDS?

• Fear
• Guilt
• Low self esteem
• Distrust of adults
• Self blame
• Difficulty in forming relationship with others
• Depression
• Violence behavior
• Aggressiveness
• Succidal thought
• Drug addict
• Criminal behavior
• Alcohol addict
• Smoking
• Anxiety
• Loss of concentration
• Eating disorder
• Poor communication
• Learning disorder
• Developmental delay
• Sleeping disorder
• Death

HOW KIDS CAN AVOID THEM?

• Talk about body part early and call them by their names.

• Teach them that some of her body part are private.

• Teach them that they are boundaries to a lot of things including their body.

• Give them code inform of words to alert you when they are in danger and could not say it in case visitors are in the house.

• Tell them not to hide anything from you, that there's no room for secrecy.

• Tell them that nobody have the right to take picture of their private part.

• Teach them that they should not allow anyone to touch their private parts and they should not touch another persons own that private means it belongs to them alone.

• Teach on how to get out of danger, Scarry or uncomfortable situations without being affected by saying stop I will tell on you with boldness and run immediately from there.

• Tell them that they will never be in trouble if they do not hide anything from you.

• Tell them that nobody have the right to maltreat them.

• Tell them that nobody have the right to send them for Hawking or to buy something without them getting approval from you.

• Teach them they should not accept or collect gift from anyone without your approval.

• Teach them that they should not follow anyone known and unknown.

• Tell them not to accept lift in a car.

• Tell them that nobody have the right to force or threaten them to do anything that is not good.

• Tell them that you will deal with anybody that try to abuse them and handover such a person to the governmental authority ( police ) and government will jail or imprison the person for 14 years.

• Teach them about their right which are:
  • right to education
  • right to religion
  • right to life
  • right to be love
  • right to freedom of slavery
  • right to freedom of speech and
  • gender equality

• Finally tell them that these rules should be apply to everyone including people they know and other children.

Note if possible let them have the phone number of these support group that fight against child abuse which are :

• Child protective services agency
• Police
• Hospital

CONCLUSION

Child abuse is something that will will expose the child to all kinds of inury, disease, give a child a life time trauma and even shorten the life of the child. So everyone one should fight against it and protect children weather they are our own or not knowing that children have the same right as adults do and they are the leaders of tomorrow and more so they are precious gift from Jehovah God that need to be love and cherish.

I invite @vickydear, @iddy and @eddyiddy to participate in this Contest.

Thanks for reading

Cc
@steemkidss
@benton3
@goodybest
@ngoenyi