Taipei, April 4 (CNA) Vice President Annette Lu said Monday she deplores the increasing prevalence of parents abusing their children in local society. "Child abuse has become an ever-more serious social issue in Taiwan due in part to a lack of parenting education. It is deplorable that parents fail to love their own children and even maltreat them," Lu said at a roundtable meeting on child abuse problems as part of the Women's and Children's Day celebrations.
Quoting official tallies, Lu said the number of child abuse cases reported in the first half of 2004 marked a 10 percent increase from that reported in the whole of 2003. "In 1994, 1,638 child abuse cases were reported in 1994 and the number had jumped to 5,349 by 2004. If juvenile abuse was included, the number exceeded 8,000 in 2004, or an average of one child and juvenile abuse case reported every 1.1 hours last year," Lu said.
Worse still, Lu said, 81.06 percent of abusers were parents, while 6.9 percent were baby sitters, 3.67 percent were relatives and 4.33 percent were their parents' live-in lovers.
In her view, Lu said, abusive parents mainly result from their ignorance of parental responsibilities. "Love for children is the basic parenting principle. It's unthinkable that parents maltreat their own children. Child abuse is an irresponsible way of life," Lu said.
Quoting the results of a series of surveys by children's welfare groups, Lu said marital problems accounted for 20 percent of child abuse cases, 11.6 percent resulted from abusive parents' alcohol or drug abuse, 10.9 percent were related to poverty and 9.8 percent were caused by parents' unemployment.
According to Lu, Taiwan is advanced in terms of children's welfare legislation. "We enacted the domestic violence prevention law in 1998, the sex crime prevention law in 2002, the family education law and the children and juvenile welfare law in 2003, and the gender equality education law in 2004. It's lamentable that we have so many child abuse cases even after the enactment of all those laws, " Lu said, adding that the government, social workers, scholars and experts should pool their wisdom to work out measures to prevent child abuse. "We should not only consider how to help abused children but also hammer out measures to prevent those cases from happening, " she added.
The outspoken vice president further said that the local women's movement has focused only on sexual liberation while failing to put equal emphasis on cultivating sexual ethics. Lu said she believes this deficiency is one of the major causes of the significant rise in child abuse in Taiwan in recent years. "Besides helping abused youngsters, we should from now on devote more efforts to exploring relations between the genders and improving parenting education to prevent child abuse," Lu added.