Effectiveness of a nursing intervention on child violence

Abstract

Background: physical and psychological abuse persists in some families even when an extensive institutional social work is developed in Cuba to protect children. Although it is not so frequent or serious, it is still a problem.
Objective: to assess the effectiveness of an educational strategy to raise the level of knowledge on child abuse in parents of children under five years of age.
Methods: a pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental research was carried out at “José Martí y Pérez” University Polyclinic in Santiago de Cuba during 2023. The universe was made up of 50 parents of children under five years of age. The educational strategy was carried out in four stages: diagnosis, design, implementation and evaluation. Theoretical methods were used for research foundation; questionnaire as an empirical method as well as percentage as a summary measure and McNemar’s test were used as statistical ones where conditions existed for its application, with a significance of p<0.05.
Results: we found that before the intervention, most parents had insufficient knowledge on the actions that constitute an act of physical violence (60.0%), psychological violence (80.0%), sexual and economic violence (68.43%) and denial of rights (86.0%); these results were modified after the intervention in more than 90.0%.
Conclusions: the educational intervention with actions to strengthen prevention from primary health care was effective in increasing knowledge about the types of violence that parents exercised on their children.