In Korea, widely spread tendency of sexuality openness and easy access to commercial and indiscreet adult websites caused negative influence to young boys and girls. As a result, the issue of unmarried mothers emerged as a most serious social issue.
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In Korea, widely spread tendency of sexuality openness and easy access to commercial and indiscreet adult websites caused negative influence to young boys and girls. As a result, the issue of unmarried mothers emerged as a most serious social issue.
In developed countries, the welfare policy for unmarried mothers and their children are included as an important object in their welfare policies, and active aid are provided to them based on the supporting policy for the single parents.
In Korea the issue was predominately blamed as individual faults due to biased viewpoint, therefore, the national welfare policy for the unmarried mothers was limitedly developed.
However, as the number of unmarried mothers who want to bring up their children is increasing and birth rate is very low, Korean society recently aims to realize the universal family welfare policy based on gender equality in order to build up new era family system.
In these context, this study reviews problems of the welfare policy for the unmarried mothers in Korea and practices in foreign countries to aid sole parents, then try to find an improvement program and/or proposal for effective and concrete welfare policy for the unmarried mothers suitable to Korean society.
A framework for social welfare analysis sugested by Gilbert and Terrell was utilized in the study.
1. Dimension of social allocations: This is related to "Who will be recipients?" or "To whom benefits or aid will be provided?" All the unmarried mothers and their children should be recipients. An unmarried mother who has opted adaption, or opted raising up, or a teenage unmarried mother should be recognized as a form of family, and appropriate supports based on the welfare policy should be provided.
2. Dimension of allowance: This is the core work to execute the welfare policy for the unmarried mothers and consists of securing income and providing social welfare services. Direct income to be secured should include living cost, medical expenses, expenses to bring up children, and housing expenses, etc. Important social welfare services should include programs to prevent unmarried mothers, counselling programs, expansion of facilities, programs to aid home staying unmarried mothers, program to help coming back to normal social life, employment training, program to secure schoolworks of juvenile unmarried mothers, unified legislation related to the unmarried mothers, legislation of responsibilities for unmarried fathers, etc.
3. Dimension of finance: This is related to mode of financial resource and systems of transfer for the welfare allowance and service. It can be divided in to official and unofficial. There are various sources of funds. Efforts should be exerted to secure the welfare budget comparable with the level of developed countries. One way for the financial resource to be pursued is to secure expenses to grow up children via legislation of responsibilities for unmarried fathers.
4. Dimension of delivery system for social welfare service: Because allowance paid to unmarried mothers and social welfare service are variously provided in different fields, delivery systems can be available from very different routes. Therefore, official and unofficial programs for welfare, health care, employment, etc. should be combined, and programs for allowance and service system should be integrated or linked.
If unmarried mothers are perceived as a group requiring protection in the society, they can be provided with welfare benefits from national organizations. However, such services should be surely limited in contents and/or quality. From this respect this study views that an unmarried mother and her children should be recognized as a form of family and that aid based on appropriate welfare policy should be provided to them.