- Author: So, Hyunsoog
- Title: The orphans on the boundary - A study on public welfare service focused on Korean orphan problems during the Japanese colonial period
- Language: Korean
- Journal: Society and History 73: 107-141
- Publication Year: 2007
- Publisher: Korean Social History Association
■ Abstract This study aims at revealing the characters of public welfare service as a mechanism of protection and exclusion for social minority during the colonial period, analyzing social discourses and practices for Korean orphans. The social counterplan for juvenile vagrants changed from passive driving-out-policy to active commitment-policy during this period. The establishment of orphanages absolutely depended on the civil sector in colonial Korea, because the colonial government was hardly interested in colonial welfare service before entering the total war period. At that time, the social pressure for orphan relief was raised from not only sympathy for human right but also need for sanitation, purification of cities, prevention of crimes. A gaze toward the orphan as 'pitiful compatriot' was overlapped with that of hatred and fear for juvenile vagrants. The social solution of those complexity was the strengthening of orphanage/reformatory as the rearing/surveillance system. There was not any essential difference between orphanage and reformatory as the facilities of social normalization or rehabilitation for minority children by education and labor. The orphanages were both deficient in quantity and poor in quality. Therefore, many Korean orphans were driven from orphanages to the streets. Orphans were located in vague standings between juvenile vagrants and 'the bad boys' by arbitrary judgment of the colonial government. At the late colonial period, the colonial government proclaimed scraping out 'the bad boys' to mobilize Korean juvenile vagrants as soldiers and workers for the total war system.
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