Women and Physical Safety:

¡@¡@Most victims of marital violence are women, but we lack precise statistics to manifest its severity in Taiwan. According to the investigation of the Ministry of Interior on 3,475 Taiwan women in 1993, 1% of them experienced spouse abuse. In 1990, the Social Sction of Taiwan Province Government interviewed 2,000 Taiwan women in which 81.9% are married. The interview showed that 11.5% of married women are sometimes beated by their husbands, and 1% experience spouse abuse very often. However, the "1994 Report on Taiwan Women's Living Status" compiled by Taiwan Province Government pointed out that numbers of the abused married women have been increased to 17.8%. According to the 1996 report of Northern Women's Welfare Center of the Bureau of Social Affairs of Taipei City Government, from 1992 to 1996, they receiveed 3,019 women's phone calls for help with respect to marital violence each year. Based on this report, there are approximately 15,000 to 17,000 abused women each year in Taipei City.

1. Physical Abuse:

Physical Abuse takes many forms including hitting, punching, pulling hair, slapping, grabbing, biting, kicking, breaking bones, bruising, burning, twisting arms, throwing victims against walls and furniture, throwing objects and using weapons that cause the physical hurt on or death of the victim.

2. Sexual Abuse:

Sexual intercourse without consent, assaulting the victim's sexual organ, or having sex in a way that the victim dislikes.

3. Psychological Abuse:

Psychological Abuse takes forms in the following ways:

• Intimidatation or Threat: Intimidating the victim in order to control the victim:
  • Performing certain action, playing dangerous weapon, or damaging household goods and furniture to terrify the victim.
  • Using the custody of children to threaten and control the victim.
  • Using suicide to threaten the victim.
  • Threatening to hurt people that the victim cares about.
  • Threatening to disclose the victim's privacy.
• Emotional Abuse: Most victims consider emotional abuse as more intolerable than physical assault. Forms of emotional abuse include:
  • Insulting the victim's sense of self-esteem.
  • Humiliating the victim to make her feel guilty of her behavior.
  • Insulted behavior that leads the victim feeling shame in front of her family and friends.
  • Deliberately picking faults of the victim to cause quarrel.
• Manipulation and Separation: Insolating the victim from the society by restricting the victim's contact with other people:
  • Derogating the victim's family and friends and preventing the victim's contact with them.
  • Spying the victim's phone calls.
  • Being jealous of the relationship between the victim and her male friends.
  • Suspect the victim's social activity and always show up in the victim's social activity.

    These behaviors are to isolate the victim from the society, to decrease the victim's self-confidence and loosing the ability to seek help from her family, friends, and social service resources, and to manipulate the victim.

A:

1. Physical Abuse:

People who are responsible to the welfare of child and teenagers allow either others or themselves to hurt the child and cause the child's death or damage in physical function.

2. Carelessness:

Due to the ignorance, intented, or untended carelessness of care-givers that cause the physical or psychological damage in the child.

Careless behavior includes:

Irresponsibile to what care-givers should do: Without providing enough food, clothe, shelting place, medical care, education under the definition of the government, and social opportunity;

Doing what care-givers shouldn't do: Using the child to beg in public, commit a crime, have the child to participate in activity that are bad for his/her physical and psychological health, providing the child access to adult films or publications, allowing the child to smoke and take drug, etc.

3. Sexual Abuse:

Perpetrator includes any family member, relatives, friends of the family, or strangers. The perpetrator may use force or lie to touch the victim's body, sexual organ, or even having sex with the victim.Usually the victim is in a weaker and powerless position comparing with the perpetrator such that the fact of abuse is not eacy to be aware of.

Forms of Sexual Abuse in Child and Teenagers Include:

• Peep;
• Taking photographs or making films with naked child and teenagers;
• Allow child/teenagers to watch films or pictures that contain sexual intercourse;
• Verbally sexual abuse;
• Sexual organ's contact with mouth;
• Touch the private part of child/teenagers' body with force or lie;
• Force the child/teenagers to do sexual business;
• Force child/teenagers to touch the perpetrator's body;
• Sexual intercourse or buggery;
• Other behavior related to sex.

4. Psyhcological Abuse:

This includes humiliation and intimidation to child/teenager, or constantly treated the victim with unfair and unreasonable means, which undermine the development of the victim's intelligence, emotion, and psychogical completeness. Psychological abuse may occur individually, but victims who experience other forms of abuse also expereince psychological abuse.

¡@¡@Legal action against child abuse has been included in the revised Children Welfare Law, items 15, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, and 34 in Feburary, 1993. Youth Welfare Law announced in January, 1989, principle 9 also loosely defines the power of intervention of local government in the youth abuse when a teenager's parents, adoptive parents, or custodians desert or sell the teenager by intention, or force or allure the teenager into inappropriate vocation or obscene behavior. From the perspective of the law, the Child Welfare Law is more complete than the Youth Welfare Law.