Research On Child Abuse Behavior In Criminal Law

Recently, the high frequency of child abuse draws widespread attention and extremeanger from the public. The judicial judgment deals with the events of child abuse in differentways, various accusations, and various penalties, which impels us to think about whethershould we regulate the behaviors of child abuse and how to do it.According to the principle of modesty, we can use the criminal law to protect people’slegal rights when all of other laws cannot achieve this goal. In a way, it is hard to protect thejuveniles from maltreating through civil law, because most events of child abuse take placewithin the family, so, it is incapable to punish the trespassers by civil compensation. Thoughadministrative law is a main measure to regulate the behaviors of child abuse, it is not enoughto reduce the harmful consequences of the serious events to the society, and the function ofpunishment and education of law is limited. So, it is necessary to regulate the child abusefrom the point of criminal law.Nowadays, both at home and abroad, there are mainly two patterns to regulate childabuse. One is to set up particular accusations. The171thitem of the Penal Code of Germanyand the195thitem of the New Zealand criminal code and other similar items impose liabilityfor child abuse. The other is regulating the maltreating by classifying the behaviors of childabuse by other systems of accusations. For example, the170thd,176thand other more than tenitems are all applied for child abuse, the accusations consist of crime of abandonment，assault,offence of intentional killing, the crime of sexual abuse, carnal intercourse, the crime ofviolation of conservation and compulsory education and so on. In our country, mainly thecharge of abusing a member of one’s family and the charge of insulting another in CriminalLaw can be used to regulate the behaviors of child abuse, but there are lots of loopholes, sothat many behaviors of child abuse cannot be prosecuted by criminal law. In order to keep thecurrent system of criminal law, we can consider drawing the lessons of Japanese legislationexperience, regulating the child abuse by perfecting the system of charges.For the sake of perfecting the system of charges of regulating child abuse, we mainlyconsider classifying the behaviors of child abuse as body persecution, mental cruelty and theviolation of parenting responsibility, and regulate them pertinently. At the same time, we should revise the charge of abusing a member of one’s family, the charge of insulting another,and the charge of abandonment, expanding the scope of application of the charge of insultinganother, and the charge of abandonment, and dropping the conditions of the application ofcriminal law for insulting children.