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Influence Of Child Abuse On The Academic Performance Of Secondary School Students
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According to Onye (2004), child abuse is
an evidence of poverty. Aderinto and Okunola (2008) equally recorded
that some children reported that they were pushed into street hawking
for maintenance needs of the family. That means that they are the
breadwinners of their various families at their early age. It is a
common sight in major parks and streets in Nigeria to see children of
school age between 6-16 years as bus/taxi mates, hawking wares, pushing
trucks for money or begging for money when they are supposed to in the
classroom learning in the schools. All these point to the fact that the
worst hit groups are children who are at the risk of diseases,
exploitation, neglect and violence.
Although, the potential impact of
child abuse is large, but evidence of causal effects of maltreatment
on children's longer term outcomes in school is generally lacking. The
current state of evidence for a link between childhood maltreatment
(physical and sexual abuse or neglect) and school performance is limited
to negative associations between maltreatment 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, & Pianta, 2003). Abused children are also prone to
difficulty in forming new relationships with peers and adults and in
adapting to norms of social behavior (Shields, Cicchetti and Ryan,
2004). Although, these examples of negative associations between child
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 and Wolpin, 2003).
In addition, not
much of the previous evidence linking childhood maltreatment to worse
school performance generalizes well to older children in middle and high
school and to children not already identified as needing services.
Evidence of the impacts of maltreatment on academic performance in the
general population of middle and high school students is needed to
establish evidence of effects on schooling attainment in the general
education population and on economic outcomes in adulthood.
Using a
large dataset of United State of American (U.S.A) adolescent sibling
pairs, this study explores effects of maltreatment-neglect, physical
aggression, and sexual abuse on adolescents’ performance in middle and
high school. First, the questions of how childhood maltreatment
theoretically could negatively affect later school performance, and of
how unobserved family background and neighborhood characteristics might
influence ordinary least squares and fixed effects regression estimates
of relationships between childhood maltreatment and later school
performance, are discussed. Second, empirical estimates from models that
controlled for observable and unobservable family and neighborhood
characteristics are presented.
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]This project work focuses on the effects of child abuse on students’ academic performance. The study attempts to unravel the causes, effects and remedies to child abuse among secondary school students in Lagos State. It was carried out in Bariga Local Government Area of Lagos State. A sample of 100 was randomly drawn from selected secondary schools in the local government and questionnaires were administered to the respondents. The mean percentage test, which was adopted in the study†... Continue reading---
