Al-Hikmah University Journal

Emotional abuse unlike many other forms of violence is a non-physical attack that is common among school children. Emotional abuse is one that degrades self-worth and interferes with development and productivity of a child. This study therefore investigated incidence of emotional abuse as expressed by secondary school students in Ilorin Metropolis, Kwara State. The simple random sampling technique was adopted for the selection of 200 respondents that participated in the study. The instrument used for this study was a self-developed questionnaire titled “Incidence of Emotional Abuse Questionnaire” (IEAQ). The instrument possessed a reliability coefficient of 0.69 after being subjected to the test-re-test procedure. The instrument consisted of 15 items which elicited information from the randomly selected respondents. A research question and three null hypotheses were formulated and tested with descriptive and inferential (t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistics. The hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed that secondary school students expressed having experienced a lot of emotional abuse such as name-calling, verbal intimidation, isolation, ignoring, and humiliation. Further results indicated that class level, gender and family type did not influence the views of the respondents. It was recommended that school authorities should periodically enlighten the teachers and other school staff members on how to avoid the use of emotional abuse on students. Also, Government and Non- Governmental Organizations should from time to time organize community counselling programmes to sensitize the teachers on the effects of emotional abuse.