Government to Investigate Abuse of 10,000 Children Unvaccinated Against COVID-19

The government is strengthening efforts to identify children under the age of 2 who are at risk of abuse. A focused investigation will be conducted on children under 2 years old who have not received vaccinations or have not visited a medical institution for a year.

On the 13th, the government held a Child Policy Coordination Committee meeting chaired by Prime Minister Han Duck-soo at the Jongno-gu Government Seoul Office to discuss the "Measures to Strengthen the Identification and Protection of Children at Risk of Abuse and Victims." Starting from the 17th, a focused investigation will target 11,000 children under 2 years old who have not received mandatory vaccinations or have not visited a hospital in the past year.

The current child risk identification system targets children under 18 years old and operates by investigating only those children with high risk among those for whom risk information has been obtained. The problem is that some children for whom risk information has been obtained are not included in the investigation, or the information itself is not smoothly acquired, creating blind spots in the child risk identification system. In January of this year, there was a case where a 1-year-old child died despite having risk information such as no medical visits or vaccinations, but was not included in the investigation target.

Accordingly, the government plans to conduct a focused investigation on children under 2 years old by July and to carry out a full survey of students with long-term unexcused absences by April. The long-term unexcused absence students include those in kindergartens, elementary schools, and special schools. Jo Woo-kyung, head of the Child Abuse Response Division, explained, "We recognized that the current child risk identification system has limitations in detecting abuse risks for children under 2 years old. Especially since the detection rate of abuse in 2-year-old children is low, we judged that a separate focused investigation is necessary."

Furthermore, a system allowing local governments to utilize child risk information to conduct their own identification efforts will be introduced by the second half of this year. To improve the accuracy of the system, a model to predict new children at risk will be introduced by 2024, and the investigation cycle will be shortened from the current 3 months to 2 months. Additionally, a new early intervention system will be established to provide psychological counseling and parenting education to families in the period before child abuse is determined after investigation.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.