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Abstract
Children become victims of atrocities in different cultures which affects their mental and physical health. Child Abuse Scale (CAS; Malik & Shah, 2007) was devised to measure child abuse inflicted by parents for 8-12 years old children. Based on the researcher's experience, children got confused in responding to the same scale for both mother and father at a time. Moreover, sexual abuse-related items couldn't be retained originally. The present study was carried out to modify, standardize and develop norms for the CAS for the Pakistani population. Participants of the study included 700 children of 8-12 years (both boys & girls) drawn from mainstream schools (non-clinical sample; n = 600) and the child protection and welfare bureau (clinical sample; n = 100). Participants, after taking formal permission from authorities, were administered with CAS-R and a detailed demographic information sheet. To ensure construct validity, Principle component factor analysis was run which bare three factors for CAS-R, labeled as Physical & Emotional Abuse, Physical &Emotional Neglect, and Sexual Abuse. Both mother and father forms revealed high reliability for overall and subscale scores. Item analysis revealed good internal validity. The CAS-R is a psychometrically sound measure for the assessment of abuse inflicted by parents.
Keywords: Child Abuse Scale, physical & emotional abuse, neglect, Sexual Abuse
INTRODUCTION
Defining child abuse is stranded in the parenting styles and child nurture considered appropriate in a culture. However, the presence of harm as a consequence of abuse and neglect is an important legal consideration. Physical abuse, emotional abuse, neglect and sexual absue are the universal types of abuse (Scannapieco & Connell-Carrick, 2005).
The collectively reported type of abuse is physical which is quite direct but still ambiguous based on cultural and societal factors (Child welfare information Gateway, 2009). Emotional abuse is an unfitting act or failure to provide a child with adequate emotional availability and non-physical nurture. Physical neglect is an intentional or unintentional omission by a caregiver accountable for the child, which results in psychological harm (Gustavsson & Segal, 1994; Erickson & Egeland, 2002). Emotional neglect is regarded as a lack of caregiver support and encouragement, mostly seen as emotional deprivation. Another complex, rarely reported type of abuse is sexual abuse which involves any sexual activity with a child without...