The Changes of Multicultural Families and Social Welfare Policies

Abstract

The number of multicultural families is expected to increase by 31.1% over the next 8 years from 268,000 in 2012 to 351,000 in 2020. In proportion to the extension of average long-term residence of multicultural families, there have been changes in many ways. With a dramatic increase in divorce due to the family conflict and domestic violence, separated multicultural families have steadily increased. In addition, marriage patterns have shifted from first marriage to remarriage. Although the Korean government provided the legal basis and a new turning point for multicultural family support policy, it focused only on early settlement and adaptation of marriage immigrants. In reality, it has not been able to cover multicultural family life cycle changes and dynamic and various needs created in multicultural families. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the specificity and changes in policy environment and to explore a new multicultural policy reflecting them in order to establish policies to cover the multicultural families with various characteristics in preparation for rapidly changing multicultural society. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the specificity and changes in policy environment related to multicultural society in Korea. It aims to elicit policy suggestions by analyzing the current state and achievement in the multicultural policies and performing a comparative analysis of policy examples of developed countries. In addition, it aims to understand the characteristics, conflict factors and policy needs of newly integrated multicultural families. Finally, this study aims to derive Social Welfare Policies for social integration of multicultural families. The Social Welfare Policies are as follows. The first is to improve irrational and discriminative legal system so that it is possible to accept various multicultural families as a common family pattern and they can live lives without discrimination. The second is to strengthen family relationships of various multicultural families and social adaptability. The third is to ensure the stability of various multicultural families. The fourth is to strengthen the family function in order to prevent poverty of separated various multicultural families and to enhance their health. Fifth, the service basis such as infrastructure improvement and network construction should be established for the efficiency of multicultural family services. Sixth, improvement of the social perception of multicultural families and promotion of understanding should be preceded.