Factors Affecting Child Development: Highlighting the Facts in the Perspective of Child Abuse in Indian Scenario

Child abuse occurs in all cultural, income and ethnic groups and it can be broadly classified under physical, verbal, sexual, emotional or through neglect. It is often assumed that child abuse is an underlying problem encased in bigger problems like human trafficking, etc. The main objective of the paper is to identify the ischolar_main causal factors of this problem of Child Abuse. This study has identified seven factors which had some contribution to this problem and they are broadly classified as: health-related problems, physical-abuse-related factors, education-related factors, income-related factors, family-related factors,overall child development and socio-economic improvement. The data was collected with the help of a structured questionnaire using a Likert scale. The reliability as well as validity testing was done for this study. Furthermore, structural equaation modeling (SEM) was used for the analysis of the data.