The physical and verbal abuses that are inflicted on adolescents at schools is a tremendous public health and psychosocial problem causing harm to their emotional, behavioural, social, and academic development. The present study was undertaken with the goals of assessing the prevalence, types and consequences of physical and verbal abuse among adolescents. A descriptive research design was developed using purposive sampling to collect data from 150 school-going adolescents using a structured questionnaire. The results indicated a large prevalence of abuse with 97% of participants reporting physical abuse and 94.4% experiencing verbal abuse. Most adolescents experienced abuse on “sometimes” or “often” basis; therefore, showing repeated victimization for similar experiences while in school. Correlation analyses indicated a significant positive relationship between abuse experienced and the emotional effects of abuse (r = 0.154, p = 0.034), self-esteem of adolescents (r = 0.289, p = 0.001), behavioural effects of abuse (r = 0.419, p < 0.001) and cognitive/academic effects of abuse (r = 0.383, p < 0.001); thus indicating that those adolescents exposed to higher levels of abuse were likely to experience greater difficulties with respect to psychological, behavioural and academic functioning. The study concludes that there is a significant impact of physical and verbal abuse on the well-being of adolescents and highlights the urgent need for effective, school-based intervention programs, awareness programs, and strict child protection policies to help ensure a safe learning environment for adolescents.
Subash et al. (Thu,) studied this question.