Child Abuse Case Study

INTRODUCTION
“We look at a person and immediately a certain impression of his character forms itself in us”
(Asch, 1946, p. 258).
Introduction to the Problem
Currently in the UK around 50,500 children are experiencing some form of abuse (NSPCC, 2013a). It is shown that around 11.5%, or one out of nine young adults, during their childhood, experienced harsh physical abuse from an adult (NSPCC, 2013b). Radford and colleagues interviewed children below the ages of 11 and up to the ages of 24, but one of the group of children this study is interested in is 11 years and younger, of which he interview 2,160 parents of children aged 11 years and below (NSPCC, 2013b). He found that 1.3% or 1 in 80 of these children had experienced physical abuse from their parents or their guardians (NSPCC, 2013b). There was also around 0.8% or one in 120 children, of which had experienced extreme types of physical abuse from their parents or their guardian (NSPCC, 2013b). With cases like these, the parents or the guardians normally get taken to court whereby, jurors then have to decide whether they are equitable for the charges they are made against. In many of the research studies, it is known that there are many variables which are able to cloud a person's judgement, when making such a decision of whether the parent or guardian is guilty or not. One of these variable factors that could interfere with a person's judgement is the attractiveness of the victim, which is what this study is interested in. In other words, if the victim of the child abuse case, the child, was deemed looking unattractive, would this then potentially effect a person's judgement to whether, they were deserving of the abuse given to them by their parent or guardian? This would th...

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... the situation regarding what they would have done with the matter, to put themselves in the shoes of the mother and whether the mother was deserving for a fine/sentencing for her actions.

Rationale
The hypothesis for this study is:
Hypothesis 1:
That significantly more participants will pick the unattractive child stimulus picture to be punished, than the attractive child stimulus picture.
The following is merely just a speculation that was decided whilst analyzing the results. There are:

1.) Whether there is a difference in gender of the participant (male or female) and in the condition there are in (attractive or unattractive), to whether they are more likely to punish the child.

2.) Whether significantly more participants will pick the unattractive child stimulus picture of ‘deserving’ to be punished, than the attractive child stimulus picture