Research On The Criminal Law Regulation Of Child Abuse

Since1960s, child abuse has been a social issue of the international community.It has become the very important project in the field of the international children’swelfare and the children’s protection. Because child abuse has become a basic,common, serious and global social issue, more and more government departments,non-governmental organizations, scholars and the public starts to pay more attentionon the problem of child abuse. In our country, lots of cases about child abuse happenevery year. However, this phenomenon has not been controlled all the time; on thecontrary, it becomes more and more serious. Our government, academia, and thepublic have not paid enough attention on the problem of child abuse. Child abuse isharmful to the society. It can not only lead to the physical pain, injuries and disability,but also can lead to psychological, mental problem and personality disorder. So, it isdefinitely not conducive to children growing healthily and cultivating the soundpersonality and it really has very bad influence on the social morality and theharmonious development. Therefore, Chinese government and academia should giveenough attention to the problem of child abuse. One of the most important reasonswhy the phenomenon of child abuse can not be controlled is that our criminal law hasthe severe defect in regulating the behavior of child abuse. In the judicial practice, wecan only punish the behavior of child abuse through abuse, insult, intentional injury,and stir-up-trouble and other charges. But, due to the limitation of the elements ofthese charges, they can only stipulate very small parts of the child abuse behavior.Thus, it is essential to improve and enrich our criminal law’s rules to regulate thebehavior of child abuse. The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyze thereasonable way of child abuse in criminal law’s regulation. The method of case study,annotation research method, and comparative research method is adopted in this paper.This paper firstly defines and explains what is the child abuse behavior and thendefinitudes the specific types of the child abuse behavior: physical abuse,psychological abuse, and sexual abuse, neglect and so on. The behavior of child abuse is harmful to the society, but, there are no specific rules to regulate the behavior ofchild abuse in the criminal law. The existed charges in our criminal law cannotregulate all the child abuse behavior. Thus, there is vacancy in the identification of thechild abuse and penalty application. In order to effectively regulate the behavior ofchild abuse, it is necessary to improve and enrich the regulations related to childabuse in our criminal law. In this paper, in reference to foreign criminal law aboutchild abuse behavior, some viewpoints about child abuse behavior regulation in ourcriminal law are deeply researched. At present, there are mainly two opinions aboutthe regulation of the child abuse behavior: adding the child abuse charge and fixed theabuse. If child abuse charge is added, our law will be very redundant and in thejudicial practice, it will overlap with abuse, which goes against the basic principlesand the basic spirit of the criminal law. Actually, to effectively regulate the behaviorof child abuse and protect children’s personal right can be realized through fix abuse.The path to perfect our criminal law regulating the child abuse is that our criminallaw should expand the scope of abuse, intensify abuse crime punishment and modifythe mode of prosecution. By means of criminal law to effectively regulate child abusebehavior is beneficial to fully protect the legitimate rights and interests of children, toprotect human rights and to safeguard social fairness and justice.