A Study on Factors Associated with Child Sexual Abuse and Recognizing the Severity: Special Reference to Galle District

Abstract

Child Sexual Abuse has been a global epidemic with devastating consequences. One in four girls and one in six boys have been experienced some form of sexual abuse in their tender age in the world. According to Police statistics, Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) cases is growing in recent years in Sri Lanka too. Galle is among the four districts where the reported child abuse cases high and the reported CSA complaints are increasing extraordinarily. Also, there is no previous research have been done in the Southern part of the country regarding the crisis of CSA. So, main objective of this study is to determine the key risk factors that affected to a CSA in Galle Police Division, and to develop suitable regression and machine learning models to predict the severity of CSA. 225 CSA cases reported to Police Child and Women Bureau of Galle Police Division during the period 2017 – 2020 were treated for this study. Out of twenty-one risk which were found from literature and knowledge of domain experts, sixteen variables showed a significant relationship with response variable severity of CSA according to chi-square test of association. Traditional OLR model was performed to predict severity of CSA and to detect key risk factors to a CSA with two different data selection methods. Next, machine learning techniques: Decision Tree, SVM, and PNN were trained to classify severity of CSA. Random over-sampling technique was used to overcome the class imbalanced problem persists in the dataset. Finally, bagging technique was executed to conserve robustness of models and to improve performance. The OLR model classified the severity of CSA with 68.85% accuracy. Machine learning techniques, Decision Tree, SVM and PNN model classified the severity of CSA with an accuracy of 82.15%, 77.68% and 85.25% respectively. PNN model performed with higher accuracy better than other fitted models. The results obtained from this study can be used to take precautions and to arrange awareness sessions for adults to reduce CSA in Galle Police Division. Also, the study can be extended to the whole island to reduce CSA and to make it a better place for children.