아동학대 관련 법률의 개정방향 ― 보호자의 아동학대에 대한 대응방안을 중심으로 ―

Regarding parents’abusive act against children, we hoped that one of the extraordinary measures, which was legislating and applying the Special Act on Punishment of Child Abuse Crimes(“Act”), would be working efficiently. It happens, however, that there are now extensive critics on the Act after six years from the first appearance. Many scholars comment on many defects. Among those, this paper will be focusing on the point that the Act made large blind spots in terms of protection of abused children and proposing a possible solution in narrowing the spots. In the definition of ‘child abuse,’ there are so many kinds of acts and it is not probable that there may be only two categories of response, one is to punish and the other is not to accuse at all. In fact, the Act was based on this false assumption. This paper proposes to classify parents’ abusive acts against children into five categories, and to define the second one as ‘maltreatment’ and the third as ‘child abuse’ differently from the Act’s proposition that these two need not be accused at all. The point is that the Act does not include ‘maltreatment’and ‘child abuse’in the definition of ‘child abuse crime’, which is the only target of the Act.