Teaching Children about Rape and Sexual Violence

Research Proposal on Rape

Background and Rationale

To keep children of our society safe and prevent them from suffering from the negative psychological effects of sexual assault in childhood, it is mandatory to teach today’s children about healthy relationships and with whom they can feel protected. Also, it is now felt even more important to tell anything suspicious about someone close who wants to harm them and not to keep it a secret even if the person insists or threatens. Various reports worldwide have cited that sexual violence towards children is mostly from their acquaintances or people they know well, in which men abuse females more. In contrast, males have been mistreated by both genders equally. Hence, children of both genders and adolescents are the primary subject of child rape and sexual violence that needs crucial attention for the social and health welfare of the entire community. 

Sexual assault could be defined in terms of rape, sexual violence, incest, and commercial sexual exploitation of the victims without their consent, in which children have suffered as well (Murray, Nguyen, and Cohen 321). Each year 1 in every ten children, either girl or boy, have been forcefully involved in a sexual act (“Sexual Violence”). These are the statistics that have been estimated worldwide, but it is expected that there might be a higher number of cases that go unreported. One hundred twenty million girls have been forced to get involved in such shameful acts by those close to or knew well in the family. 

The children suffer physical pain when they have to undergo sexual assault or rape and long-term psychological effects that have serious counseling implications even when they are adults. The psychological effects could be witnessed in the form of anger, crying, rage, sorrow, social isolation, grief, depression, feebleness, vulnerability, panic attacks, anxiety, nightmares, or in extreme cases, suicidal attempts. 33% of the women and 18% of men have been victims of child rape that had cost them their peace even after decades have passed (Hall and Hall). Further, there could be adverse reactions to childhood rape as well, such as the same child when grows up to being an adult might get involved in more powerful sexual actions, exhibiting the unequal power relation between the powerful and the suppressed ones as his trust was betrayed back in the old days (Wohab and Akhtar 144). On the other hand, there could be severe employment complexities for adults who have suffered from sexual violence during their childhood. There could be a serious downfall in their job performance as child’s fears could come back to life when they sense something similar at the workplace, showing bad work performance. Additional signs could be the inability to focus, low attention, loss of motivation, anxiety, stress, vulnerability, and lesser association with work peers, leading to social isolation at work. Symptoms of depression could develop at this stage for people who have suffered in their childhood, which could direct them to be reckless towards themselves or people living around them, particularly their family members. 

The proposed research topic could be important since it has both macro and micro impacts. In macro terms, each country’s government might have to revise their economic budgets each year to treat children victimized. Research from 2014 suggested that globally $7 trillion economic costs have been incurred on children who have been physically, psychologically, and emotionally assaulted in sexual terms. This requires serious attention from the authorities to take strict measures on how to solve this dilemma so that future of our upcoming generations can be secured. Also, micro impacts are observed in the form of individual mental influences that the child feels as they have to think of how their parents would feel if they disclose the matter to them, the societal reaction towards the child and his family, and the potential consequences if police are involved, etc. These are the most likely thoughts of adolescents who hesitate to report the sexual violence against them, aging from 7 to 13 years within a month (Murray, Nguyen and Cohen 323). 

Research Questions

Based on the background and importance of the proposed problem, the proposed research questions could be:

· How important is it to teach children about sexual violence or rape?

· When is it the right time to teach them about sexual violence or rape? 

Research Methodology 

A mixed-method approach could be adopted in which qualitative and quantitative methods could be included. It could be used because results from one type of research methodology corroborate with the results of the other type. Since sexual assault is related to the child’s physical and mental health, a mixed-method approach is deemed useful in the health research area for combining the subjective insights of qualitative data with standardized and generalized data obtained from quantitative research (Regnault, Willgoss and Barbic 2). 

For qualitative research, a systematic literature review could be conducted for which studies could be analyzed for extracting themes about the right time of the child to learn about rape and how important it is to teach the child about this, for instance. Also, quantitative research could involve quantitative surveys that could reflect the participants’ responses in the real research and give their opinions about the same research questions.

Research Analysis

Research analysis for the qualitative section of the mixed-methods approach would be analyzed with thematic analysis by extracting themes from the literature review. The themes would be related to the previous studies in which parents, teachers, or relevant participants have revealed their viewpoints about the right age for children to be taught about sexual assault, its types and when to indicate when something risky happens, etc.

Also, the themes would be extracted based on the importance of children learning about rape at a young age. The viewpoints could be different based on people’s social and cultural influences that need to be explored so that sexual assault and its pertinent image could be investigated deeply from the minds of adults. Likewise, the thematic analysis would be useful in examining these perspectives with flexibility so that great emphasis could be put on similarities and differences from diverse standpoints (Nowell et al. 2).

However, there are trustworthiness issues in qualitative research, especially thematic analysis, for which a step-by-step approach to conducting the thematic analysis should be followed. In this process, each stage would require trustworthy strategies to be implemented so that implications from this proposed research could be used by stakeholders meaningfully for our children’s health, well-being, and social welfare and the entire society in the future. 

Analysis of quantitative section of currently proposed mixed-methods research could be done using central tendency measures such as interval data, means, or standard deviations. A 5-point Likert scale would be beneficial in gauging the respondents’ attitudes towards the importance of teaching about rape to children and at what age this practice should be carried out. Since scales ranging from 1 to 5 would be used, particularly ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” the unified results would highlight more reliable and better-constructed responses for the individual questions (Bishop and Herron 299). 

Discussion of Ethical Issues 

Certain ethical issues need to be taken into consideration before conducting mixed-methods research. Two types of ethical concerns should be taken into account as two research methodologies are involved; qualitative and quantitative research. For qualitative research, which is a systematic literature review and its thematic analysis, it is necessary to identify suitable orientation, identify the accurate purpose of the study, search for the relevant and correct literature, evaluate and screen evidence from the shortlisted reports, making substantial connections from the past studies with the current research question, and communicating it as well as concisely with the targeted audience of the research report (Suri 42).  

Similarly, ethical issues related to the involvement of human participants for the quantitative research section of the current proposed mixed-methods investigation include providing respect for the individuals, doing no harm to them, and offering justice on both individual and societal levels (Yip, Han and Sng 685).

It would be seriously taken care of that participants are informed about the research and its purpose so that their consent is obtained. Even after knowing the cause, any participant who chooses to opt-out of participating in the survey would not be forced to fill out the questionnaire at any cost. Moreover, the possibility of causing any harm would be eliminated to ensure it is entirely the subject’s decision to participate. In addition to that, maintaining confidentiality is another important aspect of research involving human participants.