Childhood Abuse and its Relationship with Family Status, Gender, and Age in some Jordanian Schools

Background and Objective :is the period for children to confident and grow strong and with encouragement and love of their family and an extended society of caring adults.This study examined the relationships between childhood abuse, family status, gender and age in Amman, Jordan. Materials and Methods: sample of the study consisting 198 children (123 boys and 75 girls), aged between 8 and 16 years. Some of the participants were living with their fathers and mothers’ others were living in special houses, with a single parent, or with relatives. Childhood Trauma Questionnaire- Short Form (CTQ- SF) is used in the study. Results: results indicated that the children living with their parents reported significantly less than those not living with their parents. No significant effects of gender were found on any of (CTQ) domains except the physical neglect. There were significant differences between children with age range (14-16) and children with smaller ages in all domains of (CTQ) in favor of older ages. Conclusion : the findings suggest that living far away from a normal family atmosphere is a strong variable affecting on developing childhood trauma.

display to their children, the environment in which the children grow up, the behavior of adults other than their parents around them, and the kind of communication that takes place in the family home are important for the children to develop a healthy personality (Bayhan, 1998). Childhood victimization is typically part of a matrix of environmental problems such as poverty, unemployment, parental alcohol and drug problems, and inadequate family functioning (Widom and White 1997;Kruttschnitt, McLeod, and Domfeld 1994).

Literatures review
There have a number of previous studies have been done around the world, investigated the relationship between child maltreatment and quality of life (QoL) in Norway. The study sample consisted of 335 adolescents living in residential youth care (RYC), 235 of them exposure to maltreatment others did not, and 1017 adolescents from general population used for comparison. This study reported that exposed adolescents in RYC reported poorer maltreatment than peers in control groups, i.e. childhood maltreatment was associated with a poorer QoL score (Greger, Myhre, Lydersen, and Jozefiak , 2016).Another study found that there was a positive relationship between physical abuse and negative social skills, a positive relationship between directing to crime and sexual abuse and negative social skills, and a positive relationship between neglect and emotional abuse and negative social skills (Saltali, 2012). Similarly, Di Pierro, Sarno, Perego, Gallucci, and Madeddu(2012) found that the selfinjurers were more impulsive, and aggressive than non-self-injurers and reported more sexual and physical abuse episodes than non-self-injurers. Also, Al-Sweeti (2012) reported that the students were faced with three kinds of violence from their families; i.e. psychological abuse, neglect, and physical abuse.
In another studies the results should that 96% from the children had emotional abuse, 84% had physical abuse, 59% had sexual abuse and 88% had neglect (Madigan,Vaillancourt, Mckobbon& Benoit, 2012). In Pakistan, Malik (2012) posits that the abuse children overall perceived their parents to be rejecting; severely abused children perceived more rejection. The results also revealed that contrary to the assumption, children scored higher on emotional abuse than on physical abuse. No gender differences were found on the level or type of abuse. Moreover, Nederlof, Van der Ham, Dingemans, and Oei (2010) found that the five maltreatment subtypes (measured by the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire) to be differentially and uniquely related to the normal and pathological personality dimensions in juvenile delinquents. Furthermore, Widom, Czajaand Paris (2009) indicated that significantly more abused and/or neglected children overall met criteria for BPD as adults, compared to controls, as did physically abused and neglected children.
In the last few years, there has been growing interest in investigations the childhood abuse in response effort of several foundations to curb this issue. Aforementioned phenomenon has become acritical predicament and thus hypothesized that childhood abuse negatively effects in personality and growth of children. The major aim of this study is to examined the relationships between childhood abuse, family status, gender and age, and to identify the possibility of influence of living far away from a normal family atmosphere on developing childhood trauma.

Materials and Method Sample
The data used in this study collected from Amman city schools. The sample were 198 children (123 boys and 75 girls), aged between 8 and 16 years (M= 11.98, SD=2.02). Some of the participants were living with normal families (i.e., with their fathers and mothers, n=128), others were not (i.e. they were living in special houses, with a single parent, or with relatives, n=70). They were in classes range between 3 and 11. Table (1) shows numbers and percentages of female and male participants in each group of children (children not living with their two parents, and children living with their two parents), and table (2) shows numbers and percentages of first group children across places that lived in, and gender variables.

Measure
Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form (CTQ-SF) is used in the study. This is a 28-item, self-report inventory assessing three domains of childhood abuse (sexual, physical, and emotional) and two domains of childhood neglect (physical and emotional). The items are rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale . In this study five items of sexual abuse were removed from the questionnaire, and the other items were rated on 3-point scale according to jury opinions.  used the following definitions to describe each subscale. Emotional abuse refers to verbal assaults on a child's sense of worth or well-being or any threatening behavior directed toward a child by an older person. Physical abuse refers to bodily assaults on a child by an older person, which pose a risk of, or result in, injury. Sexual abuse refers to sexual contact or conduct between a child and an older person, including explicit coercion. Emotional neglect refers to the failure of caretakers to provide basic psychological and emotional needs, such as love and support. Physical neglect refers to the failure to provide basic physical needs including food and shelter.   (3) show that children, generally, are ranked on abuse levels from mild, as a majority, to sever, as a minority in all domains of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the total score. The results of one-way ANOVA show that the differences of the children's scores on all dependent variables are significant across the three trauma levels (mild, moderate and sever).

Results
Table (4) reports the results when the same statistical procedures are conducted for each group of children (Children living and not living with their parents).
Journal of Education and Practice www.iiste.org ISSN 2222-1735 (Paper) ISSN 2222-288X (Online) Vol.11, No.33, 2020  Children not living with their two parents, Gr2= Children living with their two parents. As shown in table (4), sever trauma level is found among children not living with their parents in all domains of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the total score. Meanwhile, sever trauma level did not appear among children living with their parents in all domains of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire except in the physical neglect which included only four cases. Again, one-way ANOVA results show highly significant differences in all dependent variable across the three trauma levels (mild, moderate and sever).
In order to determine the differences across the two groups, t-test for independent samples was applied as presented in table (5).  (5) show the influence of living far away from a normal family atmosphere on developing childhood trauma. All (t) values in all domains of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the total score reflected significant differences at (α≤0.05) in favor of children not living with their parents.
To determine the gender effect on childhood trauma, mean, standard deviation and t-test for independent samples on each domain of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the total score were calculated, as shown in table (6) Journal of Education and Practice www.iiste.org ISSN 2222-1735 (Paper) ISSN 2222-288X (Online) Vol.11, No.33, 2020 (6) show that there is no significant effect of gender on childhood trauma, except on physical neglect, i.e., (t) values in all domains of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the total score are significant except in the physical neglect domain.
Participants' ages were grouped into three categories (8-10, 11-13, 14-16). One-way ANOVA was used to determine the age effect on childhood trauma, the results are illustrated in table (7).  (7) are statistically significant at (p=0.01). That means the differences among age ranges are significant in all domains of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the total score.
Post Hoc Scheffe test is used to determine which pair of comparisons was significant. Table (8) shows the pair comparisons that contain only significant differences.  (8), all pair comparisons are statistically significant at (p≤0.05). In other words, there were significant differences between children with age range (14-16) and children with smaller ages in all domains of (CTQ) in favor of older ages.