RIYADH, 6 February — The first international workshop on child abuse in Saudi Arabia has stressed the need for a legal framework.
Although more than 40 such cases have been reported at King Faisal Specialist Hospital alone and 70 from various hospitals in Riyadh, the dimensions of the problem at the national level have yet to be defined in the absence of reliable statistics.
This message came across yesterday at the First International Workshop on the "Diagnosis and management of child abuse in Saudi Arabia". The workshop, being held at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, has been organized by the Department of Pediatrics at KFSH. Experts from the Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Bahrain are participating in the workshop, which will discuss various aspects of child abuse, including its diagnosis and management.
The main objective of the workshop is to increase public awareness.
The workshop will also recommend measures for having in place a mechanism for safeguarding the rights of children. It will propose measures for setting up a national child advocacy committee at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center to act as a referral center for reporting cases.
Referring to the cases of child abuse, Dr. Hoda Al-Kattan, chairperson of the organizing committee and head of the pediatrics department at KFSH, said one of the main problems was the lack of a legal mechanism.
"At present we only report such cases to our hospital. But there is no legal framework in place for a reporting mechanism at the national level," he commented.
Dr. Hoda attributed the incidence of child abuse to several predisposing factors, including social problems and the presence of handicapped children in the family.
In his presentation on "Child Abuse: tertiary care experience", Dr. Abdullah Al-Dowaish, consultant pediatrician at KFSH’s Department of Pediatrics, said child abuse cases reported at the hospital fall in the categories of physical, emotional and psychological abuse.
Dr. Al-Dowaish said that in a number of cases the mother would either inflict injuries on the child or fake symptoms of child abuse to stay in hospital, so that she could be away from her home to avoid family problems.
"They cause bleeding in the child or fabricate other symptoms to prolong their stay at the hospital," he said, adding that in one of the cases the child ingested some detergent powder which later proved fatal. It was not a deliberate act to kill the child but one committed in the mistaken belief that it would help prolong her stay at the hospital.
