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Ministry focuses on preschoolers as target of abuse

The central government will list preschoolers as its main target for child abuse prevention and control next year, as preschoolers have been proven to be the most vulnerable group of victims of child abuse, a Ministry of the Interior (MOI) official said yesterday.

Huang Pi-hsia (黃碧霞), the director-general of the ministry's Children's Bureau, said that 10,290 cases of child abuse were reported around the country in the first nine months of this year, compared with 10,094 cases recorded for the whole of last year.

This year's cases include those uncovered in 1,700 of 35,000 families that have been listed by the ministry as high-risk households, Huang said.

Of the 10,290 cases, nine resulted in death, with all the victims being preschoolers aged six or younger, she said, adding that the number does not include another 17 children who were killed in 13 filicide-suicides recorded during the January to September period.

To help in the prevention and control of child abuse among preschoolers, the MOI is planning to cooperate with the Bureau of Health Promotion and the Taiwan Pediatric Association to facilitate the gathering of information about possible child abuse cases, in addition to charging chiefs of villages and boroughs with the responsibility of reporting such cases to the authorities, she said.

Wang Ming-jen (王明仁), executive director of the Taiwan Fund for Children and Families (TFCF) , said the identification of child abuse involving preschoolers can be difficult, as many children in that age group are not enrolled in school, adding that the results of a TFCF survey found that only 3.4 percent of child abuse cases involving preschoolers were reported by preschool educational institutions.

Wang said that 580,000 children aged three to six are not sent to daycare institutions or kindergartens and 84,000 children up to the age of two have not received preventive inoculation provided by health authorities, which he said means that more than 660,000 preschoolers are not subject to any extra-familial monitoring or protection.

He suggested that the government set up a more comprehensive child daycare and preventive healthcare system to better protect preschoolers.

For example, he said health authorities should trace the causes behind the failure of parents to get their children inoculated and transfer the cases to social affairs authorities if any suspicious situations are detected, he said.
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