Awareness of pre-school teachers about the signs of physical abuse (sample of city of Eskisehir)

The extent of child abuse in Turkey has not been sufficiently investigated. When it is encountered, the evaluation and management of an abused child is generally inadequate. Thus extensive documentation should be collected and determination of case is needed. Physical abuse of a child is generally defined as harmful behavior of parents that would affect the physical and emotional development of child. Parents, siblings or other relatives of a child might abuse a child at home, and also their teacher, friends and someone else might be the abuser. This study is descriptive by nature. The population of the study is composed of 160 preschool teachers working for state schools under the management of the Ministry of National Education in 20062007 education year in Eskişehir. The sampling of the study is the same as the population because of its accessibility. A 44item questionnaire was used as a data collection device to get the opinions of the teachers on physical abuse of children. The responses to the questionnaire were fed into the computer to analyse the data. The SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences for Windows 12.0) program was employed for stastistical analysis of data. In analyzing the data, the opinions of preschool teachers were first stated in numbers and percentages, and then their chisquare tests were calculated. The data gathered in this research suggest that the teachers were incapable of determining physical abuse. It has been observed that there exists a significant correlation between the ability of the teachers to detect physical abuse and their service time, schools they graduate from, and their level of knowledge in this issue. Finally, it can be concluded that preschool teachers need more information on child abuse. Furthermore in order to help the early diagnosis of child abuse, inservice training programs should be initiated to enable teachers to identify highrisk children and tending parents