Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Programs Training on Reducing Emotional Abuse and Neglect by the Mothers of the Children with Mild Intellectual Disability

Introduction: Children are one of the most vulnerable population groups in the community and they are threat-ened by the risk of being abused by different people in the family or community. Objective: the current article mainly intends to examine the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral programs training on reducing emotional abuse and neglect by the mothers of children with mild intellectual disability. Methodology: in the study, an ex-perimental-field or pretest-posttest design method with control group in a student society was applied. In this study, the experimental group received 12 sessions of cognitive-behavioral program on a weekly basis and in two sixty-minute sessions. Sampling was performed using simple random sampling of 80 students with mild intellectu-al disabilities, and 30 with the highest scores obtained in the child abuse questionnaire. Then 15 patients in the experimental group and 15 in the control were randomly assigned. To assess the variable of the current research, ICAST-C Child Abuse Questionnaire was used as pre-test and post-test. The results were analyzed by using One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANCOVA) and Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MONCOVA) Results: The results showed that cognitive-behavioral training reduces emotional abuse and neglect perpetrated by mothers. Conclu-sion: these findings show the significance of applying behavioral-cognitive program training in reducing emotional child abuse and neglect and emotional abuse behaviors perpetrated by the mothers of children with mild intellec-tual disability.

Cognitive Program Training; Emotional Abuse; Child Abuse; Neglect; Mothers; Children with Mild intel-lectual Disability