Levels of teachers? awareness about child exploitation and negligence

This work was carried out with the aim of determining the awareness of teachers, who have an important role in diagnosing child exploitation and negligence, and the education deficits in our country about the issue.The study was carried out with 400 teachers who accepted to fill in the questionnaire and worked in 23 elementary schools among 51 elementary schools dependent on Ministry of Education in Afyonkarahisar province. The study was completed with 241 teachers, because 159 of 450 teachers have not completed the 60% part of the questionnaire. Data was collected between the dates 01.03.2011 and 01.06.2011.Data analysis was performed in SPSS 18 package program using percentage, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, chi-square test, Kruskal Wallis t- test and One Way Anova test.According to our findings from the data, teachers have indicated that they have never been educated about child exploitation and negligence in their undergraduate education and professional life so far and for the last 12 months, 87 of them have never been informed about child protection law, and 84,2% of teachers who have no information about the topic needed to be informed about it. When we look at the teachers? report situation according to the laws of child exploitation and negligence, 86% of teachers have stated that they have to report. Among the places that child exploitation and negligence should be reported to the school management has the largest proportion and it is followed by director of social services. The teachers have declared that the reasons for not reporting child exploitation and negligence are, with 39%, the lack of evidence related to the topic, and with 22%, afraid of pushing the child into a worse situation than the current situation. When we have evaluated the scale of indication and risks of child exploitation and negligence, no teacher gets full points, but, it has been observed that the teachers with higher professional experience have identified and recognized the indication and risks of child exploitation and negligence.Based on our findings, in our study, the importance of application of intervention and prevention programs against child exploitation and negligence in our country has been represented.Keywords: Child, exploitation, awareness, teacher, report