Forget child abuse: more and more Korean children abuse their own mothers, swearing at, hitting and kicking them. Most are boys, from preschoolers to those in fifth and sixth grades in elementary school and junior high school students. Anything can set them off, from being ordered to stop playing computer games to being told to eat. The language they use is foul, including threats to kill their mother, and some spit and even beat their mothers black and blue. Throwing books or CDs is commonplace. Yonsei University’s Severance Hospital finds that one-third of its 1,060 patients in child and adolescent psychiatry over the last two months were admitted for violence against their mother. Even two or three years ago, this was unheard of.

Samsung Medical Center’s child psychology unit in Seoul saw 585 of 1,010 patients over the last two months for behavioral disorders and emotional disturbance. The major reason for admission was extreme defiance of their mothers and behavioral problems. Lee, who has a son in junior high school, came here after she was beaten by her son to the point where she got bruises on her face. Introvert and rarely expressing his feelings verbally, the son vented his suppressed anger at his mother whenever he was bullied by friends at school, who often took things away from him. It has been almost a year since her son started behaving that way, but the last straw came when he hit his mother in the face for refusing to buy him a CD player. The boy was hospitalized for a month and the mother, whose self-esteem was completely crushed, also had to get treatment.

At a children's counseling center in Gangnam, Seoul, Min-su (not his real name) a second-grader, is being treated. He talks to himself: "What's this?", "Shut your mouth!" and hits a doll hard. He throws things at his mother and kicks and bites her when she does not take care of him when he wakes up in the morning. His violent behavior started causing problems at school as well.

Why do these children turn on their mothers? Experts say the phenomenon is uniquely Korean. Shin Yee-jin, a psychiatrist at Yonsei University, said, "Abroad, teenagers engage in violence and problematic behavior mostly outside their home, but here in Korea, they do so at home and particularly against their mother. We are considering whether to classify such behavior as separate from ordinary teenage delinquency and violence.” Ahn Dong-hyun, a professor of psychiatry at Hanyang University, says mothers believe they are doing their best to take care of and support their children, but children respond “Am I your doll?” or “You do this just because you want to; I never asked you.” “It is because they suffer a defiance disorder and need to be treated appropriately,” he adds.

Mothers are the victims but also the cause. What is common to children who use violence against their mothers is excessive intervention by the mother in the life of their children. "Children who beat their mother in most cases come from families where the relationship between mother and father is closed,” psychiatrist Park Jin-saeng said. "When the father is the sole breadwinner and the mother is completely in charge of taking care of and educating the child, the mother often tends to control her child's everyday affairs, starting from study to friends and even the color of socks he or she wears.”

Korean society is not ready to address the problem. Mothers are ashamed to make their suffering public. Often they don't even tell their husband about it. Jo Hye-jung, a professor of sociology at Yonsei University, said, "There are children who use violence against their own mother in a normal middle class families, but such cases are not made public to save face and avoid problems with their child's education.” There are no statistics to show how often such cases occur. Thirteen counseling centers under the Seoul City educational authority have received 66,516 cases between the beginning of this year and October, and 24,573 of those were about family, violence and personality problems. A considerable number of them concerned violence against family members.

(englishnews@chosun.com )