Indigenous Social Work Practice – A Need for Promoting Child Rights Knowledge Among School Teachers

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Lilly Pushpa S, Dr. M. Daniel Solomon

Abstract

Social Work is a noble profession with the blend of scientific knowledge and humanistic practice (Hilaria Sounadri). School social work is a specialty area of the practice of social work that focuses on the performance and the bio-psychosocial factors that affect students’ school achievement and school social worker carries out the psychosocial service (Ozbesler and Duyan 2009) towards children and other stakeholders of children in schools. Hence Social work in school setting as an indigenous social work practice has greater significance in the well-being of children. Today child rights violation is an issue of social concern, abuses on children at home, school and in the community are multifaceted and the problems of children have become more complex leading to cases of lack of interest for schooling among children, school dropouts, child suicide, missing children etc growing intensely.  One of the reasons for such a situation of children seems to be a lack of knowledge on child rights among school teachers and absence of their role in the care and protection of children. This brings to the attention of the social work practice that as champions of human rights, school social workers have a scope of promoting child rights knowledge among school teachers. Hence the researcher intended to conduct a study among school teachers with regard to their knowledge on Child Rights in Udupi District Karnataka. The main aim of the present study is to understand the level of Knowledge on Child Rights among school teachers. Descriptive research design has been adopted. The universe of the study consists of school teachers in Udupi District, Karnataka. About 782 samples of school teachers were selected by adopting Proportionate stratified random sampling technique. Self Prepared Questionnaire on Child Rights Knowledge was used. SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) 23 version was used for analyzing the data. The result portrays that more than half 52.7 percent of the school teachers are having low level of knowledge on child rights. The teachers working in Government schools have high level of Knowledge on Child Rights than the teachers working in the management schools. To conclude the school teachers who are working in unaided schools with degree qualification are having low level of knowledge on child rights. Hence this category of teachers can be addressed by the school social workers for enhancing their knowledge on child rights.

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