抄録
Active discussions have taken place in Japan since the 1980s over the diversification and personalization of families and their members. The obviousness of the nuclear family as a form and modern family ideology now appears to have lost relevance. Current child abuse prevention measures regard families with no father as a defect and single-mother families as being at risk of child abuse.
This study examined whether public institutions have a tendency to determine single mothers as child abusers, using data on abuse cases handled by a child consultation center. Based on the results of looking at the relationships between family types and the severity of abuse as well as the number of notifications of abuse, it was found that people were more likely to notify a child consultation center of the possibility of abuse for single-mother families than two-parent families with fathers and mothers and tended to report the level of severity at the single-mother families as being “at risk of abuse” and the type of abuse as neglect. Interviews with six single mothers judged as abusers suggested the possibility that public services provided by public institutions were a burden on them. Single mothers judged as abusers are placed on the watch list of public institutions. According to the interviews, these single mothers felt that rejection of public services made the surveillance stronger and that they were rejected from the regional community. These single mothers were frustrated with the regional community. However, they neither tried to fight against the community nor become assimilated into it, in an apparent attempt to maintain a stable life.
JEL Classification: Z19
