The Impact of Poverty for the Child Neglection

Abstract

Poverty could be well-known as unable to deliver basic needs for their children such as proper nutrition, access to health care, required education, adequate supervision, and emotional care. Children experience neglect from their families due to poverty. Child neglect is defined as the failure of providing essential food, clothing, shelter, medical care, or supervision for the purpose of a child’s health, safety, and wellbeing for the child from parents or guardians who have the responsibility. There is no reported research work to identify the association between poverty and child neglect in Sri Lankan Context. Therefore, the objective of this study is to identify the influence of poverty on child neglect. To achieve the purpose of the research, 10 interviews and 134 questionnaires were distributed to neglected children who were reported in Gampaha District and 10 interviews were carried out for the parents. In this work, discriptive statistics and content analysis methods were used for analysis purposes. Research outcomes show that physical neglect is the most common type of child neglect. While the cognitive neglect type has the lowest respondents. Supervision and emotional neglect rate as the second and third categories respectively. Based on the parent’s intention, low income, marital status, low educational level, homeless and jobless status are directly affected to increase the poverty within the family.