Child Abuse From Parent's Eyes: A Metaphoric Study

The aim of this study is to determine the perceptions of the parents of preschool children about child abuse via metaphors. In order to determine the metaphors that express the perceptions of parents about the concept of child abuse, the phenomenology model which is among the qualitative research methods is used in the research. This research was carried out with 187 parents with children aged between 1 and 6 who were determined using appropriate sampling method in 2017-2018. Perceptions of parents about the concept of child abuse were obtained with the answer to question of "What do you think child abuse is like?" and explanations with complete the sentence starting with "because". The subject and source of metaphor are tried to be determined by the first question. The meaning and reasons attributed to this metaphor were tried to be revealed with the sentence "because". Content analysis technique was used to evaluate the data. When the categories, which were based on the answers of the parents, were examined and it was found that parents developed 75 metaphors in 11 categories. When the categories of child abuse are considered as a whole, the parents mostly developed the metaphors: doomsday, massacre, cancer and non-closure wound