Recently, the incidence of child abuse has been rising in Korea and become a problem that has a significant impact on the society. The intent of this study was to present main features of Korean child abusers and introduce empirically-validated measures for assessing them together with a generic manual for treating them. In order to achieve this, we reviewed a vast literature on child abuse and detailed some of the specific factors that characterize child abusers with a focus on physical abusers. We also investigated the Korean child abusers who were being incarcerated in prisons using prison records and some empirically supported measures(i.e., PSI, CTS, CAPI, etc.). We found that child abusers were high on CTS, CAPI, compared with community people. Using logistic regression model, we confirmed that child abusers were high on PSI, CAPI controlling for sociodemographic variables such as age, gender, marriage status, education level. Particularly, these two measures were good at discriminating incarcerated child abusers from community nonabusers.
We presented three practical target skills in a generic manual that should be addressed in the psychological treatment of child abusers: behavioral, cognitive, affective skills. Behavioral skills include behavior management skills such as attending and ignoring, issuing instructions, using rewards and punishments. Cognitive skills include learning stress management and family characteristics, changing views on hostility and violence and negativistic thinking styles. Affective skills include regulating one’s own emotional state, especially anger and negative mood(i.e., anxiety and depression). Lastly, the role of therapist was stressed as a mediator for increasing participants’ motivation, and to do so, therapists’ understanding of parents’ perspectives and valuing of the collaborative processes between therapists and child abusers were discussed.