Child abuse is the physical, psychological or sexual maltreatment of a child It's categorized into four: neglect, physical abuse, psychological or emotional abuse and sexual abuse. According to various researches on the causes, impact and prevention of child abuse, It was discovered that there exists a difference between pupils academic performance in primary schools and this problem was attributed to the pupils background where some pupils were believed to have faced maltreatments from home and/ or school and other historical factors and challenges. This study therefore seeks to investigate on the impact of child abuse on the pupil's academic performance.
The research involved both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection; the study was conducted in five primary schools in Murinduko zone, Kirinyaga district in Kenya. The sample was 250 pupils (50 per school), 50 teachers (IO per school) and 50 parents (IO per school). Simple random sampling was used on pupils and purposive sampling was used on
parents/guardians and teachers. The study found that out of the population of 25 0 pupils, I 02 pupils were victims of child abuse
and out of the I 02 pupils only 32 were aware that they were under abuse. Secondly, the impact of child abuse depended on a variety of factors like the age of the child during abuse, the period of the abuse and finally, the researcher found out that the children who were free from abuse were happy, vibrant, participatory in class and stable both physically and emotionally and thus had higher chances of performing well as compared to the abused children who were performing poorly probably because of the harsh conditions physically, psychological, and emotionally among other factors.
