Educational background of the child abuse convicts in Sri Lanka
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Date
2024
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Publisher
Faculty of Science, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka
Abstract
Child abuse is one of the most violent incidents in Sri Lanka. There are nearly 10000 reported child abuse cases in 2023. There is a new trend of criminal offences against persons related to child abuse in Sri Lanka. The study was focused on exploring the child abuse perpetrators’ social background and education access in childhood. Research Problem was ‘what is the social background to get less education of child abuse perpetrators’. research question was, ‘is there a relationship between less education opportunities and committing child abuses in Sri Lanka?’. research objective was to explore the relationship between opportunities for education and committing child abuse among convicts. The research adopted an ontological approach to subjectivism and an epistemological approach of interpretivism. It was descriptive, cross-sectional, and qualitative. The study was underpinned in cognitive theory introduced by Charles Goring focused on the differences on addressing education towards crime. Ten convicted persons have been interviewed. Thematic analysis was used for the analysis. Child abuse can happen with one's own child abuse, close relatives' child abuse, neighbor child abuse, and stranger child abuse. Several risk factor characteristics of child abuse perpetrators could be identified. It could be summarized as perpetrators’ childhood experience, social interrelationships, less opportunities and encouragements to get education, less economic background, and lack of awareness about the child abuse law in the community, etc. Family background was important in determining the risk of becoming a child abuser and was intertwined with economic factors and issues related to sexual behaviour. Poor childcare and parent care relationships, frustration, socioeconomic conditions, and alcoholism are other main factors behind this behaviour. Most of them grew up not with their mothers but with close relatives such as grandparents, aunts, etc. Most of these people had only attended school up to a maximum grade eight. Many of them cannot read and write, they had associated with older people, not peers at their school age, they had been addicted to use illicit alcohol and to watch nude pictures. There were also people who had developed sexual relationships with girls of fourteen or fifteen years of age and brought them to their homes. But they didn't know or had ignored that one day they would be punished by the law. Most of the abusers had done wage labor as their occupation in paddy work and other unskilled works. Many of these abusers had failed in marriages with divorces or separations. The social background of abused children was also in an unsafe condition. 13 years of school education access must be compulsory and government attention should be enhanced to mitigate the issue
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Keywords
Abuse perpetrator, Child abuse, Sexual addiction, Less education, Sri Lanka
Citation
Subasinghe W.; Ihalagama S. (2024), Educational background of the child abuse convicts in Sri Lanka, Proceedings of the International Conference on Applied and Pure Sciences (ICAPS 2024-Kelaniya) Volume 4, Faculty of Science, University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka. Page 174