Prevalence of violence among a sample of adolescents attianding primary health care centeres in Al-Hilla city

الملخص EN

Background: adolescents represent substantial majority in all societies around the world, adolescence is the period which is witnessing a lot of changes on the physical, emotional and social level.

To understand how these changes affect on the adolescents and identify health problems and behaviors that lead to these problems in the future and helps to develop a new generation free from physical, psychological and social diseases, by finding the best ways to reduce and deal with them .

Objective: a cross – sectional study was conducted , to determined the prevalence of violence and its association with demographical characteristics of Adolescents who attending the Primary health care centers in AL-Hillah City .

Methods : the study include the adolescents patients with the age 10-19 years from both sex, who attending the Primary health care centers in AL-Hillah City .

And complete all questions of the questionnaire, the data has been collected from the 15th of March to 15th of August 2016.

Results : The overall study sample was 461 patients, which include 250 male and 211 female .The results of the present study showed that the highest percentage of adolescents were obtaining the primary education (35.4%), in addition to that the socio-economic situation for the most studied sample was in the moderate income category(51.6%).

The prevalence of the adolescents within the studied sample who was exposed to various types of violence was(39.3%) , including physical (12.4%), emotional(24.1%) and sexual (2.8%) violence.

The percentage of adolescents who are within the age group of 15-19 years more vulnerable to violence (26.5%) from the adolescents within the 10-14 years age group ( 12.8%).

The percentage of exposure to violence was higher among male than female (22.6%,16.7%).

Conclusion : Almost forty percent of adolescents within the studied sample were exposed to various types of violence, including physical, emotional and sexual violence.

Recommendation: Providing all the health care centers with experts in the field of mental health to help adolescent understand the psychological changes that occur in this period, also for the treatment of psychological conditions resulting from the exposure to violence and teach them the right way to deal with this situation.