Mental Health Awareness and Child Abuse Prevention in Pakistan

Abstract

The ratio of child abuse is increasing so rapidly in Pakistan. According to WHO report, in Pakistan 15-25% children are sexually abused (1 in 7 girls and 1 in 4 boys), in schools specifically in Karachi’s school 88.7% physical abuse had been reported. The main issue is that no one wants to talk about it. Our main purpose was to aware people that it is not something to not talk about, we wanted to aware especially children how to prevent from bullying, sexual, emotional, & psychological abuse.

We went to a school for workshop and taught children few strategies. We found out that everyone including teachers were having the same old perspective regarding child abuse especially sexual abuse. At the end we somehow were successful to teach them few strategies and tried to make their perspective better regarding these issues.

Child Abuse & its Prevention

Child abuse is the most neglected issue in Pakistan, as we know that no one wants to talk about it and doesn’t let anyone talk about it to save their image.

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In Pakistan around 70% children suicide due to violence, bullying, due to sexual harassment, emotional abuse or pressure and neglection. 10-20% had been sexually abused and then killed by the rapists. 70-80% children don’t know about touches and no one is allowed to them in a manner which hurts them. In Pakistan mostly parents release their aggression on children in shape of beating them and they don’t even know that how this effects their child mental health. Recently in this year 5-6 students attempted suicide and killed themselves due to parental pressure in academics results.

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5-6% children had killed themselves due to bully. As we were seeing these issues in children and no one wanted to aware them, listened them so, we wanted to start this chain of awareness also “someone said intelligence is providing the children their wings besides with the rudder of awareness to keep them secure from prying hands”. The conformation of such a filtered point of view that has not been widely discussed to an obligated degree considering issues in landing at solid essentials of mental maltreatment delineated in this paper. Disturbs in working of paying little mind to what resembles at it of an abuse should encourage fairly, on the record of harassment the under-growing youth is being targeted the most and it is unacceptable: weakness about whether to delineate abuse subject to growth-up attributes, grown-up lead as the result for kid and impartial setting in partition or in blend: fighting over whether the rules of risks or the damage ought to be utilized in making definitions and perplexity concerning whether relative definitions ought to be utilized for understandable, veritable and clinical explanation. The propensity in the open field is to address the sorts of youths misuse which combine certain introductions of oversight or commission by adults and which produce distinguishable, negative repercussions for kids. Notwithstanding the way that saw for the validity of its belongings, mental abuse remains on the edges of youth abuse. It is battled that until mental abuse is obviously portrayed and unmistakable and is dealt with the power at present applied to want for this ‘camouflage’ type abuse and it is identified with noteworthy part results which will remain for quite a while.

Emotional Abuse

It can feel as devastating and painful as physical abuse and can truly impact your keen prosperity. It is consistently used as a way to deal with keeping power over someone. As the matter of fact it is just as harmful as sexual abuse.

The main question that comes in the mind is that ‘Why is no one talking about it?’

The children who were the victims of emotional abuse have ache from great trauma, were suffered from depression, stress, anxiety and many more disorders. Emotional abuse is ranked highest in association with anxiety, stress, depression and drug abuse. Therefore, no there are zero physical wounds that are associated with emotional abuse, it also affects the most on mental health as much as any other abuse would.

Signs

In any other case the signs can be very prominent but in emotional abuse there are no wounds therefore it is difficult to understand. Emotional abuse takes many forms and can be much more subtle than other forms of abuse, you should seek help or tell someone at the very beginning of it.

Physical Abuse

Physical abuse basically combines an individual utilizing physical power against your will, mostly starts with a slap, many survivors of physical abuse claimed that at first it was only a slap or a push but as time went by it became more intense.

The abuser often starts blaming the victim for being the cause of their active violence act or might also state that the way they acted was because of stress or frustration. The abuser will also apologies to you, it is quite common for the abuser to feel repentance, to feel guilty after every assault, they might also beg for forgiveness and make promises that they would not act the way they did in the future.

Signs

They will get possessive over you i.e. they always want to know where you are, what you are doing or who are you with. They control you when you don't do as you are asked so in result they get violent. They also damage your self-esteem, they put you down and they get jealous.

Sexual Abuse

It is an evince of fierceness which the attacker uses against someone they see as slightly less than them. It doesn't begin from a wild sex drive, anyway is a bad behavior submitted deliberately with the target of controlling and embarrass the individual being referred to. Sexual abuse is a demonstration of viciousness which the assailant uses against someone they see as flimsier than them. It is a sexual direct on anyone i.e. men, women or children.

History has it, the most setbacks of sexual abuse are women and it is a matter of fact a reality that no one can deny and it even reflects upon their social position even in the 21st century, as they are inferior contrast with men. Sexual abuse is just one more system for abusing female in a male driven culture.

Bully literally means “the power of strength that uses to frighten the weak people”. Bully is something that majority of people go through. It is a mixture of hurtful, mean and violence. No one is brought into the world as a harasser: affirmed story. Tormenting is a speedy prompt and not a trademark characteristics of anyone.

People need to be well aware that being bullied does not mean that you are anywhere near weak. Each and every one is strong enough to confront anyone who speaks with utter hate with you and tries to decrease your self-confidence.

Remember; “It’s not your fault if you are being abused”.

Methodology

First we choose the topic and approved it from our mentor Ms. Mariam and then we choose the school where we wanted to do the workshop, it was a difficult task because no one wanted to talk on this topic. We finally found the school Yan academy. After the conformation from school we started working on it we learned some skills from YouTube (https://youtu.be/eoXMcAM1WG4, https://youtu.be/rFToaIDLfdo) to talk to children about child abuse. We took guidance from our mentor and also we printed out few paper on which preventions of child abuse was written. This is the link from where we got the posters: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/how-talk-kids-about-personal-safety-check-out-these-posters-chennai-ngo-48645. After that we went to the academy and did our workshop successfully. We did our workshop with 3-4-5 class students and there were 20 students present in the workshop, they were having no concepts about child abuse but when ended our workshop almost everyone knows what child abuse is and how to deal few strategies to avoid it.

Topics Discussed at School

We discussed emotional, sexual, physical abuse as well as bully;

Emotional abuse

We talked about emotional abuse first we told them about emotional abuse and what it is? Emotional abuse is the abuse which is conscious that which we can’t see with our naked eye. It is an internal pain faced by us. We gave the children an example that if someone is forcing you to do something that you are not able to do or someone always degrades you or taunt you about which you feel bad and stress all the things which makes you cry or makes you feel bad, you should say that person that you are not liking it but if the person doesn’t stop then you should stop talking to the person. If you think some closer one is doing that talk to them directly in a polite manner.

Some major problems that child face due to emotional abuse, our society and parents should understand, so by this abuse children faced many problems and got mentally disturbed.

  • Less-confidence.
  • They can’t challenge their trust.
  • They suffer from stress and frustration.
  • They face many difficulties to maintain their relationships with friends and family.
  • It may be occur when yelling and anger become too far or when any other person try to abuse you internally.

Physical abuse

The ratio of physical abuse is increasing day by day and it is essential to spread the awareness so for that we visited the school to conduct interactive session with children’s of private school to spread awareness about physical abuse. The main agenda for this workshop was to aware children about types, forms of physical abuse. As the session was interactive. Children also shared their experience and information related to physical abuse. Furthermore we talked about that what safety measures they need to take if they encounter such situations that is they can report it to the trustworthy elder or they can report the act.

Bully

Since bullying is a form of aggression. Bullying is violent act, it has psychological and physical impacts. Basically a person become aggressive when his/her emotional needs are not fulfilled. When a person does bully since the root causes of them are neglectful parents, aggressive siblings. In short all the reasons behind bullying have one thing in common all are due to lack of emotional needs but what we can do for them. Since at home level, the most important thig we can do is to give them unconditional respect. Emotional needs of a child lies in this acronym SPECIAL (Smile which is the most powerful tool as it enhances our immune system, allow them to Explore [because child have innate consciousness of experimentation], build a close relation with them by trusting them so that they are able to trust others, give them feel that they are worthy, give them your full attention when they want to share something [that is how they learn how to treat others], give them unconditional love. We must need to be emotionally healthy because if a person is not emotionally healthy, he/she is unable to use their intellectual abilities .Similarly as IQ(intelligence quotient) is priceless without EQ(emotional intelligence).If a person is emotionally healthy ,he/she is able to realize their whole potential, in short we say their self-actualization is easy for them. But when we talk about bullying at school, which is very common. The best cure is teacher and students as well as peer themselves must built good relation. So that no one feels that he/she does not belong to there. Every student feel secure and feel their acceptance.as a result he/she able to perform better. As it is seen that ratio of bullying is less in those schools where teacher and students have good relation.

Awareness on sexual abuse

We told the children about good touch and bad touch and few strategies if someone touches them in an inappropriate manner what should they do? We first asked them that does anyone know about good touches and bad touches, a little boy said I know what it is but I will not tell you because it’s not good to talk about it, then we told them that it is not something bad to talk about and we started telling them about good touches that if your mother gives you a hug, kisses you and your father hugs you, you teacher gives you a tap on your shoulder how do you feel, you feel good it comes to good touch and when someone touches you in a bad manner when you fell anxious, bad and different don’t let them touch you and tell it to a person whom you trust the most. We told them that all the body parts that we covered with clothes are our private body parts and no one is allowed to touch those parts except your mother, your father (for boys) when he changes your clothes and gives you shower and doctor and only in the presence of your parents. Then we told them that what you should do if someone tries to touch those body parts you should shout and say no and run from that place and come to a safe place and tell an elder whom you trust the most even if the person that tries to touch you in an inappropriate manner is a friend, relative or any stranger and tell them repeatedly until they listen to you. At last we told them that if a stranger tells you that your parents has send me to pick you or your parents got involved in an accident you should not go with them, also if someone tries to give you gifts and tells you to come along with them you should not go, shout and run from that place then we told them if someone got successful to touch in a bad manner to a child it won’t be the child’s fault, it’ll be the fault of that person who touches that child.

Review from Advocate and from the Survival

Sexual misconduct or abuse can occur where one person misuses his/her position to compel another person to engage in an otherwise unwanted sexual activity. Most of the cases related to sexual abuse are from families and public places whereas family enmity issues are very common in some areas where most of the peoples are uneducated. Sexual abuse is such a big problem in these minority communities.

In a recent interview with Advocate Naveed Baig (lawyer in Supreme Court) he told us that: “The major cause of this issue is illiteracy in Pakistan, everyone should know their rights and there should be some strong acts for the culprits. And for this we need loyal and active police department as well as judiciary. He further told us that unawareness is also a major cause for these type of issues. Peoples should know the rules and acts and they should teach their Children as well. Government of Pakistan can also play a huge role for providing awareness as well as Media, can also help us on this. We should teach our children to be confident in every situation because confidence is a powerful tool for every situation.” But unfortunately we have observed that there is absence of confidence in most of the victims and because of that those culprits get chances to do the same thing with someone else.

As we have a short interview of a victim Anamta in which she expresses that she faced this type of issue from her family member but she couldn't tell anybody about this issue due to lack of confidence and because of her personal family relationships although she wanted to share it with her closed ones so that she would feel a little less burdened, or she could speak her heart out.

Summing up the whole situation, one thing that we have observed is that nobody in this entire world is trust worthy not even your closed ones. A girl in today’s era is found to be the weakest being amongst all.

Results & Discussion

Before starting the workshop we asked every student that how many of them already knows about child and sexual abuse no one responded except a boy, when we asked him what do you know he refused to tell us because he thought talking about it is a bad thing but after session everyone knew what child abuse is and everyone was talking about it. They discovered it not something bad but informational that they should know. We came to know that more than child parents and teachers should know that how they can help their child because in our society parents doesn’t want to talk about it and in the school where we went was not allowing us to talk on sexual abuse but in the end they also gave us permission and discovered that it is necessary to give awareness the children regareded this topic at the early age. In pakistan Child abuse is very common but no one wants to take a stand against it just to save their image as we can see the case of Anamta who wanted to talk on it but to save her sister relation she kept quiet but what if the person does this thing again with her or some other girl, being quiet is not a solution because today it was she, tomorrow it could be us and in future it can be our child. We took this little step towards the awareness and we will be continuing this in future to aware child as well as parents for a better and safe society where everyone feels safe and secure.

References

  1. https://youtu.be/eoXMcAM1WG4 https://youtu.be/rFToaIDLfdo
Updated: Jan 24, 2024
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Mental Health Awareness and Child Abuse Prevention in Pakistan. (2024, Jan 24). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/mental-health-awareness-and-child-abuse-prevention-in-pakistan-essay

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