Research On The Criminal Law Regulation About Child Abuse

Our country has always attached importance to the protection of children’s rights, but to our disappointment, the research on the child abuse has few achievements owing to the influence of traditional culture. It was not until Wenling child abuse case exposed in 2012 that the public and academic began to pay close attention to it. Revising the child protection system against abuse, there exist three shortcomings: first, our country is lack of special laws to legal the behavior of child abuse; second, other laws which content concerning the rights of children are regulated too crude, only have some principle terms; third, the charges in the Criminal Law can not be fully applicable. Therefore, the judiciary has no available legal means to punish the wick, thus causing the situation more and more serious. In recent years, a large number of child abuse cases have been reported by the news and media, under this background, many people suggested that use the Criminal law to regulate. The article takes such a chance to discuss, in order to enrich the criminal provisions in the aspect of child abuse and propose a way out for the judicial practice.The article decides into four parts. The first part provides the basic theory, including the definition of child abuse, the type of child abuse, the subject and object of child abuse and the harmful consequences of child abuse. Though the above-mentioned describe, we can find the nature of the phenomenon, then combines with the current situation to propose the development trend of child abuse, which guides the criminal legislation and judicature. The second part talks about the reason of using criminal law to regulate child abuse in the first place and from three angles to argument: firstly, the behavior has the serious social hazardous nature, for it not only goes against the law but also brings adverse consequences; secondly, because of the general provisions and the low legal responsibilities of other laws, it is necessary to use the criminal penalty to curb the high occurrence of this behavior; thirdly, with the construction of law society, the legal spirit and prior legislative experience both require to punish the behavior severely. In the second place, I analysis the present situation of criminal regulation on child abuse in our country. I discuss the related accusations such as crime of abuse, crime of injury, and then discover some defects in legislation, for instance, the incrimination has a higher standard, and the psychological abuse is little mentioned in the Criminal law. The third part is about the legislative experience abroad, which gives us some inspirations to strict our country’s criminal law. The last part I put forward two ideas to complete the criminal regulation of child abuse, one is refine the crime of injury, the other is perfect the crime of abuse. After comparison, I support the latter option from the following four aspects to modify: Expand the scope of the subject and object of the crime, change the mode of action, detail the configuration of the penalty, and add the provision of mental abuse. After the above completion, the crime of abuse is tighter to punish the acts of all kinds of child abuse.