BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
It has been the general assumption that children with reasonable
physical care would grow into normal happy adulthood. But scientific
investigations of psychologists, sociologist and psychiatrists
regarding personality development has uncovered the greater importance
of the growing up and its lasting effects on the total personality of a
person. Adult personality has its root in childhood. What we can do as
adult is largely determined by ways in which we were allowed into
experience inevitable events of childhood.
Thus the aim of this research work is to shed more light on the
issue of child abuse and neglect in Kaduna South Local Government of
Kaduna State.
A child is neglected when he lacks continues physical and
emotional contact with his mother. Children under this category are
those may be due to lose of mother or both parents or the separation of
both parents, thus child may be sent to nursery school or orphanages
with many children which makes it difficult for special individual
attention to be rendered to each child. Those children are therefore
brought up by stranger which could be changed at different times due to
the shift of their study.
Child abuse on the other hand can be defined as the portion of
harm to children that result from human action or in action that is
prescribed, proximate and preventable. The definition recognizes that
such harm is no accident but something perpetrated on children by
others, usually intestinally and that the actors inflicting this harm
do not enjoy society approval. It is also point out that abuse generally
come from the child immediate environment and that it is preventable
child neglect is a passive form of maltreatment or abuse UNICEF (1986).