Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process to Solve the Child Abuse Problem

Abstract

Children always bring so much joy, happiness and laughter to one’s life. Unfortunately, they were al ways being the target to abuse. The effects of child abuse are severe and long - lasting to the victims. While recently Malaysia statistic has reported a sign ificant increment of child abuse cases that have reported in this country. The graph presents a steady growth of these cases without showing any sign of decrement. The victim is only a child, who is innocent, powerless, and incapable to protect themselves without any help, care and support from people around themselves. Hence, this stud y purposed to determine the main factors that contribute to child abuse cases in Malaysia. In this study, FAHP (Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Pr ocess) are used to determine the ma in factors that contribute to the child abuse cases in Malaysia. The data was collected from the official portal of the Department of Social Welfare, Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development. The factors used in this study are family dispute, fo llowed boyfriend, unknown, financial problem, negligence of parents or guardian, illegitimate child, stepchild, adopted child or preserved by others during childhood, alcoholic, gambler, drug addicts, abuser suffered mental health problems, abuser was form erly abused and others. Three criteria consist of perpetrators, type of carer occupations and gender of the victim are taken into consideration. The result shows the family dispute was determined as the main factors of child abuse compared to the other fac tors. This finding is very important for the use of the M inistry of W omen, F amily and C ommunity D evelopment responsible for the formulation of policies and guidelines on the development of children, women and families in Malaysia. This effort is expected to reduce the rate of child abuse in turn giving them a better life.