A Sociological study on the influence of the internet on the increase of child abuse in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Children are the most precious wealth of the nation as well as the universal symbol of the naivety and beauty. According to the child rights convention of United Nations, the term “children” is defined as the group below the age of 18 years. Moreover, biologically, a child is introduced as an individual who is physically, mentally and socially immature .child abuse is the process in which children are misused and maltreated. Thus, it can be further defined as misusing children physically, mentally or sexually and bluntly harassing them. Herein there are several ways in which a child is abound. They can be named and neglected harassments. At present the internet is prominent among new technological media. However, children are abused in several ways through the use of the internet .this research focuses on the different ways of child abuses that are caused through the use of the internet. The problem of this research is how that internet use influential on the child abuse. The re-objective is to identify the behavioral changes and deviance occurred among the children due to the internet use. There in data obtained from a semi- structured interviews and questionnaires using an purposive sample of 100 students from 10 schools:05 schools from Padaviya in north central province, 05 schools from Colombo , Dehiwala, Mount laviniya from western province and 20 teachers of the selected 10 schools were qualitatively analyzed by the spss software. Accordingly, it was realized that the internet affected directly and indirectly to the child abuses. The violence activities increase viewing pornographic materials tendency of doing risky things. Here, rural and urban limitations could not be identified in sri Lankan students using the internet. Accordingly, the nature of the use of the internet by school children is not much affected by the condition of their schools or the located area of their school.