An investigation of violence against children in seto samero secondary school, jimma town

Abstract

The general objective of this study is to investigate violence against children in Seto Semero Secondary School, Jimma town. To this end, 163 children between 14 and 18 years of age were systematically selected using probability sampling and survey questionnaire was administered to them. Result of the study showed that 76 (46.7%) of the study participants responded that they experienced various types of violence in their school in the last six months. From these, 28 (36.8%) of the respondents were males while 48 (63.2%) of them were females. Regarding the types of the violence, 44(57.9%) of the respondents experienced physical violence, 7(9.2%) psychological, 5(6.5%) sexual, 8(10.5%) both physical and psychological, 6(7.9%) both physical and sexual, 2(2.7%) both psychological and sexual where as the remaining 4(5.3%) physical, psychological and sexual violence. Concerning the perpetrators, the students reported that different types of violence were committed against them by older students [36(47.4%)], by teachers [19(25%)], by gangs from outside schools [18(23.7%)] and by the school guards [3(3.9%)]. Regarding the reasons behind violence against them, 10(13.2%) gave absenteeism, 16(21%) non-punctuality, 18(23.7%) disturbance, 13(17.1%) failure to do homework and the rest 19(25%) gave reasons such as their resistance to accept the romantic requests from the older students, gangsters and failure to wear school uniforms. To conclude, violence against children is widely practiced in the school contrary to the FDRE (1995) constitutional principles and the MoE (1981 and 1988) school guidelines. Therefore, awareness raising and trainings on alternative children’s behavior modifications for teachers are recommended for the school as one mechanism to overcome the problem. Likewise, awareness creation for the children on the importance and how to protect violence against children, their rights and duties in school are also recommended as another alternative mechanism to ameliorate the problem.