Coverage of Child Abuse Issues in The Kenyan Print Media and Its Effect on Public Awareness in Nairobi’s Central Business District

Abstract

Child abuse constitutes all forms of physical and emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, negligent treatment resulting in harm to the child’s health, survival, development or dignity (WOH, 2006). It is important for the community and society to have knowledge on issues pertaining child abuse. The media plays a significant role in most of the social, political and development sectors due to the power it has to influence attitudes and behaviours of the public. The role of the media in covering cases of child abuse is therefore very critical in promoting public awareness, demystifying, reducing secrecy when it comes to discussing or dealing with this issue and preventing it. It is on this premise that this study sought to examine coverage of child abuse issues in the Kenyan print media and its effect on public awareness in Nairobi’s central business district. The design which was adopted for the study was descriptive research design and the sampling technique was purposive sampling for the target population. Questionnaires were used to collect data from the sample size of 384 respondents. The researcher obtained quantitative and qualitative data which was analyzed through editing, coding, classification and data entry in IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20. The researcher was able to generate frequency tables and charts. This study established that the majority of the respondents had some knowledge on child abuse and Other media platforms and print media were the leading sources of information on child abuse. Recommendations were that media houses should increase the coverage of child abuse reporting and Journalists should be allocated more resources and platforms to highlight stories onill-treatment of children by the people and the print media should address the authorities as voiced by the people.