Parents' knowledge, attitude, and preventive practice about sexual harassment of children in travel and tourism destination in Lombok, Indonesia

Abstract

Tourism is known as a promoter for economic growth. Lombok island is a place of interest where plenty tourists visit, but a high increasing number of visitors affect to increasing sexual harassment of local children. Child sexual harassment (CSH) is one of the seriously concerned issues. And parents are the best position with high potential to prevent CSH, they can act as a strong external obstacle to the offender accessing children. But there are limited studies were conducted on parent’s knowledge, attitude, and preventive practice (KAPP) about child sexual harassment especially tourism destination. The aims of this study were (1) to assess the level of KAPP about CSH of parents and (2) to find the association between socio-demographic, family, and community factors with the level of KAPP about CSH of parents in tourism destination Lombok, Indonesia. A cross-sectional study was conducted to assess this research. The total of 313 participants were parents who live in tourism destinations, Gili Indah village, Lombok, Indonesia, and have children age between 5-17 years old. Data collecting by using an online questionnaire. Most of the parents in this study had moderate knowledge (71.2%), both in male (72.4%) and female (69.5%) parents. The level of parents’ attitude towards child sexual harassment prevention in tourism destinations was positive (58.1%), but in detail, positive attitudes of male parents are higher than female parents, which is 69.2% and 42.2%. The preventive practice of parents was at a fair level (53.7%), with mostly male (61.1%) had fair preventive practice while female mostly had good preventive practice (49.2%). Sociodemographic factors, family factors, and community factors show significant association with KAPP of parents. But among knowledge, attitude, and preventive practice the factor they had significant association was not exactly similar. Only education that constantly showed significant association with KAPP. Finding related to factors that had a significant association with KAPP in this study can be a baseline to develop further study and program about child sexual harassment in tourism destinations.