Issues Related to Child Abuse: Toward a Shift in the Thinking on Which Public Management Relies

Abstract

This paper claims that public management should shift its way of thinking from a deductive approach to an inductive one. First, based on the perspective of the social constructionism of social problems, this paper notes that the discourse that child abuse in Japan is the worst ever is misleading. Using a normative image of the family, countermeasures against child abuse in Japan consider certain attributes of the family to be “abuse risks” without sufficient evidence and trivialize the problem of inadequate social systems into a “family problem”. This is not fair to children and their family. The discussion of social care reform, which has been developed in a way that idealizes the family, is also problematic in that it is based on a false perception of the current situation and promotes discrimination against children in social care. An inductive approach, includes an accurate understanding of the actual situation and an examination of the consequences of past cases and policies, is strongly required to provide better support for the prevention of and more appropriate responses to child abuse.