PARENTS’ KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE AND PREVENTIVE PRACTICES AGAINST CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE IN ENUGU METROPOLIS

The act of sexual abuse can occur in different forms which include rape, incest, unwanted sexual touching, non-contact sexual experience, pornography, commercial sexual exploitation, and trafficking Although the role of parents as the first trusted educators of their children has been recognized, majority of CSA prevention efforts rarely engage parents. Even in the secondary school settings where parents are aware that sex education is part of the curriculum parents and other stakeholders have expressed displeasure on the content of the instructional material which was to be used to guide the class section. Consequently there is a distrust as to the scope of such sex education in the schools. Hence, this study is interested in investigating the knowledge, attitude, and preventive practices adopted by parents against CSA. A cross sectional study design with a quantitative and a qualitative component were deployed for this study. The quantitative survey helped the researcher gain broad understanding on the knowledge of CSA, as well as the parental attitude and practice of CSA prevention, while the in-depth interviews (IDIs) were used to gain deeper understanding, yielding rich contextual data on .the subject matter. The study discovered that. Poor parenting or parental neglect is an important factor contributing to child sexual abuse, while the absence of both parents in the life of a child has been linked to early sexual debut of some children. Other risk factors that scholars have identified include being female, parental alcohol or drug dependence, having a physical or mental disability, the presence of a stepfather or mother’s partner.