Police to accompany on-site follow-ups of school absentees

Police said Wednesday that officers dedicated to curbing child abuse in Seoul will accompany on-site inspections of long-term absentees, as part of stepped-up measures to curb increasing violence against children.

Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency has launched a team of anti-abuse police officers, allocating one officer to each of the 31 police stations in Seoul.

The police officers will take the lead in investigating violence against children, conducting on-site inspections and cooperating with child protection organizations to respond to child abuse cases. 

They will be working with child welfare activists and teachers to visit the homes of students who have been absent from school for a long period of time.

The authorities plan to increase the number of officers to 20,000 by 2019.

“For now, there are limits for child activists and teachers to visit and investigate residences of long-term absentees, as they need permission from parents,” a police official said. “If police officers join the on-site inspections, such abuse cases can be more effectively detected.”

Police said they also plan to carry out monitoring of runaway teenagers and the possible abuse of children who fail to enroll at schools.

The Education Ministry has mandated that schools report whenever a student is absent for more than three days consecutively.

But concerns exist over the ambiguous perception among law enforcement officers of what constitutes child abuse.

According to a 2013 study by a team of social welfare professors at Ewha Womans University, police officers tend to be more lenient and insensitive to child abuse as they come across violence cases every day.

In the survey, only 61.2 percent of the police officers saw swearing at kids as abuse and 46.9 percent considered parents intoxicated by drugs or alcohol as problematic.

Less than half of the police recognized as child abuse parents beating a child’s face, head and ears. Only 62.4 percent of them viewed knocking down a kid as abuse and 67.9 percent acknowledged hitting children with hands or kicking them as abuse.

The experts’ team conducted the survey on 190 police officers, judges and prosecutors specializing in cases involving women and child cases, at the request of the Justice Ministry.

“There need to be education and training for police officers to teach them about the nature of child abuses and how to deal with child victims,” the scholars said in the report.

By Ock Hyun-ju (laeticia.ock@heraldcorp.com)