The present state of chid abuse in Korea and its system for child protection

Abstract

An act of children’s welfare was made in 1961 for the first time in Korea but it had been nothing but the name in view of practical impact to prevention of child abuse. Real undertakings of Child Abuse Prevention were commenced overtly since 2000 in Korea, when the law for children’s welfare was revised to put protective settings for the victims and to establish criterion for children’s safety. The history of Child Abuse Prevention is very short in Korea but the reporting cases increased very fast from 4,133 cases in 2001 up to 9,570 cases in 2008 with the enthusiastic activities from people of the associated organizations along with the national supports. But the portion reported by the mandated reporters such as teachers or doctors is still low compared to those of the developed countries. The National Child Protection Agency (NCPA) was founded in 2001 by the Ministry of Health and Welfare to prevent child abuse and to aid recovery of abused and neglected children including their families, through the cooperation of related organizations. NCPA refers reported cases of child abuse to appropriate local centers, operates a computer database system for case management, publicizes national reports of child abuse on a yearly basis and technically supports the Local Child Protection Agency (LCPA) by developing scales for assessment of child abuse and neglect and distributing programs for the education of mandatory reporters. LCPAs operate 24-hour telephone hotline, investigate and visit homes and provide in home services networking with local resources, and operate multidisciplinary teams for screening child abuse victims and supervising case management through multimodal systems. We summarized the present state of child abuse in Korea and reviewed the operating systems for child protection in this country. Through this article, we hope that medical peoples are to be informed on the seriousness of child abuse and to be able to devote themselves for the prevention of child abuse.