62P
A Land with No Child Welfare System: Content Analysis of Child Maltreatment Media Reports in China
In China, child maltreatment has received intense media attention recently. Many media reports revealed case details especially child deaths, which has raised strong public concerns. Although several studies have investigated the prevalence of child maltreatment using regional data, there is a lack of such research at the national level. This study aims to address this knowledge gap by analyzing child maltreatment media reports throughout China.
Methods
We used content analysis to analyze media reports on child maltreatment in China in 2013. We conducted our search in Baidu, the most powerful Chinese news search engine that search among newspapers, magazines, and websites of governmental and non-governmental agencies. The search keywords included “child” in combination with one of the following five words: “abuse”, “assault”, “neglect”, “sexual abuse”, and “abandonment”. The search returned 37,300 results. We reviewed all of them, and identified 108 qualified reports, which contained 155 maltreatment cases involving 228 victims and 183 perpetrators.
Two researchers independently coded the data, and the consistency of coding among all variables has a mean of 93% in a range of 78%-100%. Inconsistent coding was appraised by a third researcher to reach a final coding scheme. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used for content analysis.
Results
Among the 155 cases, nearly half were sexual abuse, including 29% rape and 19% sexual molestation; 63% of the sexual abuse cases were not reported until multiple incidences occurred. Among the victims, 64% were females; the majority (75%) of them was 12 or younger; 10% died and 17% were injured due to maltreatment. Regarding the victims’ family background, 21% of them were children of migrant workers who migrated from rural areas to work in urban areas. The proportion is six times their proportion (3.5%) in the general child population. The perpetrators included 23% teachers, 32% parents, 22% relatives or acquaintances, 5% step parents, and 18% of unknown identity. Bivariate analysis showed that teacher perpetrators were much more likely to be associated with sexual abuse than other types of maltreatment (43% vs. 15%). Most of the victims in sexual abuse cases (87%) were female, but only 41% victims in other maltreatment cases were female. Most of the perpetrators (92%) in sexual abuse cases were male, but only 22% perpetrators in other maltreatment cases were male. Our qualitative analysis showed that a limited number of victims (N=11) received services after maltreatment report. Most services were temporary monetary support. There is no structured service to prevent and intervene in child maltreatment.
Conclusions and Implications
Our finding highlighted the overrepresentation of migrant workers’ children among the victims. We also showed that the majority of the cases were sexual abuse, many of which were committed by teachers and were not reported until multiple incidences occurred. Currently, there is still no mandatory reporting or child welfare system in China. Our findings indicated the importance to build such system to protect children especially the vulnerable children from migrant families, and the need to teach children to be selective in obeying authority like teachers.