• Journal of Legislation Research
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• no.41
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• pp.43-85
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• 2011

Child and youth welfare law in Korea is vague and complex. In a narrow sense it means the research on the provisions of the Child Welfare Act. In a broad sense it embraces all of the social welfare system regarding to the protection for children and youth. Regardless of the scope of child and youth welfare law it should be cleared what the term of child and youth means in Korean legal regulation. Historically, child protection in Korea was based on the good intentions of individuals to protect war orphan children from poverty or danger after the end of the Korean War. It is the story of the evolving status of children from being viewed as dependant of the parents to becoming rights-based citizens, even not in Constitution. In Korea neither parents nor children have constitutionally recognized right. According to Korean Constitution the parents have only the obligation to educate their children. And the state ist obliged to improve the welfare of the youth(section 34). In compliance with this article there are lots of statutes regulating youth welfare. This article reviews the legal definition of child and youth to test the uncertain definition of child and youth welfare in relation to the treatment of children's and youth's legal status in Korea. According to the Child Welfare Act child is the person under age of 18, while the legal definition of youth oscillates between the person under the age of 19 and the person over the age 9 to the age of 23. As a result child welfare is often used as the synonym of youth welfare, and vice versa. The lack of the arrangement of the legal definition of child and youth is based on the historical reasons that the legal definitions of youth (under the age of 19 or over the age 9 to the age of 23) newly appeared in the statutes regulating youth welfare, whereas the Child Welfare Act still maintained the definition of child under the age of 18. In order to get rid of the confusion of the definition of the child and youth, a part of certain statues should combine with another Act according to the purpose of the individual amended statutes. And the definition of child and youth should be subdivided into 3 or 4 classes, namely infant(0-6), child(7-13), youth(14-18) and young adult(19-26). Furthermore this article proposes a reform of the existing legal system pursuant to the nature of the law, i.g. whether the issued or amended Act takes on a selective(residual) or universal character.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.167-195
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to suggest the revision direction of the Korean Child Welfare Law based on the results of the comparative analysis on the Korean Child Welfare Law and the Japanese Child Welfare Law. The main results are: Both laws have only two provisions about children's participation right. The child protective system in Japan secures the swiftness of within-two-months period of temporary protection through the child consulting center, the investigation right by the child welfare worker, publicity, enforcement on the parents' rights, and the network with the nearest child supporting center. Furthermore, those provisions with the notifying obligation by a finder of the child who needs protection and the limit of protection period are guaranteed in order to ensure the effectiveness of law enforcement. However, Korean child protective system functions only as pre-substitutive service. While the provisions for the disability children account for 21.2% of the total Japanese law, there is no provision on that in the Korean law. The Japanese law is substantially different from the Korean law in a sense that it obligates the minimum quality criteria of child service and national financial burden on the child welfare. While the Japanese law clearly stipulates the national responsibility in relation to the degree of the rights, the Korean law does not directly touch upon it. Furthermore, the Japan's law guarantees that not only children but also protectors retain the right to choose and apply for services.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.67 no.2
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• pp.113-136
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• 2015

This study is about criminal judgement of child abuse. The purpose of this study is to analyze contents and reasons for judgements about child abuse crime in detail especially focused on elements and contents of weighing of an offense and concurrent imposition and then to suggest alternatives for policies and law-enforcement for the prevention of that crime. The data were collected from 484 written judgements on 579 criminal defendants that were related to 'Violation of the Child Welfare Act' and were conducted by content analysis. The results are as follows. First, Only about 25% criminal defendants were guilty of violations of the Child Welfare Act were sentenced to imprisonment and the rest of them(about 75%) were merely sentenced to probation of imprisonment or fined. Second, Proportion of prison sentence or period of jail time have not been increased in spite of public indignation and upward of statutory punishment by legislation. Third, in the case of child sexual abuse, there are frequent cases in which concurrent imposition was not put, regardless of explicit statement in the related laws. Last, this study revealed that some mitigation factors of sentence that have been identical to crimes against adult have been applied to child abuse crime uncritically, for example agreement and regret and so on. On the basis of such results, this study proposed policy alternatives for prevention of the recurrence of child abuse, i.e. intrinsic standard of weighing of an offense, concurrent imposition to perpetrators of child abuse and so on.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Child Welfare
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• no.56
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• pp.69-99
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• 2016

Taking the perspective of children's welfare, this study aimed at critically analyzing the system of notification disposition which institutionalized children have experienced. Notification disposition is a juvenile justice process that, when a child (10 th 18 years old ) has been delinquent or is at risk for delinquency, is initiated without investigation or prosecution procedures by direct notification to a judge from the caregivers, school principals, chief probation officers, or directors of child care institutions. The data used in the analysis included case records of probation offices, and court sentencing documents of juvenile protective dispositions. Results showed that notification cases were initiated by directors of child shelters/care institutions. The most common reasons of notification were theft, runaway, physical violence, drinking, and smoking. Furthermore, there were more controversial reasons, such as "bad influence on another institutionalized children", "showing no remorse", "no sense of guilt"and "challenge of rearing in institutions" Based on the results, we discussed three problematic aspects of the direct notification system by directors of childcare institutions : (1) too much reliance on the judicature judgment of juvenile court; (2) less stability of the judicial status of notified children, and (3) inadequacies of the notifying eligibility for directors of child care institutions.

• Korean Journal of Childcare and Education
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.381-405
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• 2013

This study aims to prepare basic resources for the development of child-care by figuring out the main characteristics of child-care history, laws, and current status in Korea. First of all, in the section of child-care history, the overall trend of child-care affaires were examined by classifying it into stage 1-Child Welfare Act, stage 2-Early Childhood Education Promotion Act, stage 3-Initial Period of Child-Care Act and stage 4-Complete Revision of Child-Care Act. Second, as for child-care related laws, basic laws such as Infant and Child-Care Act, and related laws such as Early Childhood Education Act and Child Welfare Act and other related laws such as Equal Employment Opportunity and Work Family Balance Assistance Act, act on Support for Disabled Children's Welfare and Social Welfare Services Act, the information related to child-care was specified. Third, as for current status of child-care, general status, status of child-care centers and children, and types of child-care centers were examined respectively.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.115-119
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• 2022

According to the 「Child Welfare Act, Article 16(1)」, when the age of a child reaches 18, he or she is discharged from prison. However, in order to prepare an effective support posture from the central government and local governments, a clear fact-finding survey on children who have completed protection is necessary. Therefore, in this study, the most basic questionnaire on housing, health, education, employment, and social relations of children living in Cheonan City after completion of protection is required. An investigation was conducted. As a result, the housing and social relationship of children living in Cheonan city were good compared to children living in Cheonan city compared to children who completed protection nationwide. Therefore, it was found that it is urgent to establish a close cooperation system with related organizations in this regard.

• 한국사회복지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.04a
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• pp.301-312
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• 2006

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.27 no.7
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• pp.109-114
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• 2022

Recently, child abuse cases such as the "16-month death of adopted children" have occurred one after another in our society and have emerged as a serious social problem. Child abuse not only significantly violates children's human rights, but also leaves scars on the child's body and sometimes threatens their lives. As a result, laws related to child abuse have been revised several times and related systems have been reorganized to protect the affected children safely and grow healthy, but child abuse cases continue to occur. Therefore, it is urgent to come up with effective measures to prevent child abuse crimes and protect affected children. Therefore, this study examines the concept and related laws of child abuse, the current status of child abuse, and suggests countermeasures to effectively respond to child abuse compared to the US child abuse legislation and child protection system.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.66 no.2
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• pp.31-49
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to analyze precedents related with child abuse for protection of the rights of the child. There should be the law related with 'punishment for child abuse,' which is the grounds of punishment, to make a precedent in the law punishing for 'child abuse,' but there is the concept only for 'child abuse' in the Child Welfare Law, the fundamental law; therefore, for a direct judgment for punishment, only precedents of 'child abuse' related with loss of parental rights and judgements for criminal cases, civil cases and laws covering special cases have been made. For that reason, 'the special law related with punishment for child abuse cases' is desperately required (On last December 23, 2013, the special law related with punishment for child abuse cases passed the National Assembly). Hence, precedent analysis had performed by grouping precedent from 2000 to 2013 which were not judged as child abuse in trial but can be regarded as child abuse. When analyzing each precedent according to the contents of analysis and judgment by fact relevance in this study, problems which the current legislative system has were deducted through an implication of each case by diagnosing using diagraming after classifying lower instance terminated cases, which precedents of the Supreme Court and judgments sent to the Supreme Court were excluded, while excluding cases settled in the civil level and classifying analysis of civil case precedents which did not become a criminal case and completed as a civil case, analysis of criminal case precedents, classification of precedents of loss of the parental rights (regarding child abuse) and precedents of any other special laws. And compensatory tasks for special laws regarding punishment of child abuse were presented while suggesting compensatory tasks for the legislation regarding deducted problems.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.538-546
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• 2022

For the recent 5 years, the trends showed that the child abuses by parents was declined while that by child care teachers and principals, employees in child welfare institution was increased. In particular, significant increase of child abuses by child care teachers and principals should be paid attention more than the abuse by the others. The government had already enacted the Act on Punishment against Child Abuses in 2014 to respond and prevent from child abuses strongly. However, as the cases of child abuses continued, questions were raised on the effectiveness of the regulation or whether the court performed well to play a role to punish the assailants of child abuses by amended regulations was suspected. This study is aimed to review the application cases of the Act on Punishment against Child Abuses through the precedents of child abuses in child care centers and to analyze how the punishments to assailants have been changed compared to application of Child Welfare Act. This study has the meaning to grasp the incompleteness of legal application on the child abuse cases and provide the basic data to improve the legal and system.