Abuse

Hello, my fellow classmate, I am May.

Today, I would like to share with all of you about "abuse". First and foremost, I would like to define the words of "abuse". "Abuse" refer to the use or treatment of something that is harmful. There are various types of abuse that we can identify, for an example, child abuse, drug abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, animal abuse and so on.

What I would like to highlight here is about the child abuse. Child abuse is the physical, psychological and emotional mistreatment of children. Nowadays, we can see the escalating of the worldwide child abuse percentage although many steps have been taken to curb this negative phenomenon. In Malaysia, this situation is worsen years by years although the rules and legislation to protect children have been introduced and enforced through the introduction of the Child Act 2001 which is a Malaysian law to consolidate the Juvenile Courts Act 1947, the Women and Young Girls Protection Act 1973, and the Child Protection Act 1991.

One of the causes that lead to the child abuse are social stress. Stress brought on by the variety of the social condition like unemployment, illness, poor housing conditions and the death of a family member escalate the risk of the child abuse. According to the research done by the authorities, most of the child abuse cases are from a poverty family background where their parent are suffered from a serious social stress. The economic situation nowadays and the price hiking issues leads to the serious social stress especially among the poverty family and this raises the risk of the child abuse.

Next is the family structure itself. Refer to the research, most of the child abuse cases are from the single-parent families. Single-parent families usually earn less money than other families, so this may leads to the increased of the child abuse cases.

Thirdly, the family background. The children who are brought up in a violent environment will then learn violent behavior from their parents and then grow up to abuse their own children. Therefore, it is important to ensure that parents should be a good role model for their children.

Until now, people keeps questioning about how could they, the parents abuse their own children ? Most of us are come out with a general conclusion that parents who abuse their children are mental disorders, yet most of them are not suffered from any mental illnesses. According to the research done by the counselor, most of the parents who abuse children are tend to be socially isolated. This means that they are not mixed up very well with the people at surroundings and most of them only have little contact with friends or relatives. Thus, we can say that they had lead a stressful lifestyle where they shut themselves up and do not have their ways to unwind until they comes up with abuse their children. Therefore, what I would like to emphasize on is the importance to having a healthy and balance lifestyle where parents should manage their time properly so that they would have a balance between their careers and their children. In the same time, parents also should have a proper ways to unwind to ensure that they would not be too stressful or they can even try to share their problems with their friends or they can asking help from the counselor.

Last but not least, I hope that this child abuse phenomenon can be curbed completely by enforce the rules and legislation rigidly. In my point of view, it is useless that we have the rules but we are not practice it rigidly. Besides, everyone who alert about such child abuse cases, for an example, the neighbours, relatives and friends should inform the authorities immediately to prevent more and more children become the victims of violence. In the same time, government also should make sure that they would be able to response immediately to the child abuse cases after been informed.

Thank you.

Sincerely from,
Shoo May.