Abstract:
Poverty could be well-known as unable to deliver basic needs for their children such as proper
nutrition, access to health care, required education, adequate supervision, and emotional care. Children
experience neglect from their families due to poverty. Child neglect is defined as the failure of providing
essential food, clothing, shelter, medical care, or supervision for the purpose of a child’s health, safety, and
wellbeing for the child from parents or guardians who have the responsibility. There is no reported research
work to identify the association between poverty and child neglect in Sri Lankan Context. Therefore, the
objective of this study is to identify the influence of poverty on child neglect. To achieve the purpose of the
research, 10 interviews and 134 questionnaires were distributed to neglected children who were reported in
Gampaha District and 10 interviews were carried out for the parents. In this work, discriptive statistics and
content analysis methods were used for analysis purposes. Research outcomes show that physical neglect is the
most common type of child neglect. While the cognitive neglect type has the lowest respondents. Supervision
and emotional neglect rate as the second and third categories respectively. Based on the parent’s intention, low
income, marital status, low educational level, homeless and jobless status are directly affected to increase the
poverty within the family.
