The Study of Comparative Literary Model to Reveal The Phenomenon of Child Abuse in American and Indonesian Literary Works

This paper was to describe child abuse in both American and Indonesian literary works. Child abuse is a serious phenomenon both in America and Indonesia, as it is worldwide, so this research was focused on the problems of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. This social phenomenon requires special attention from authorities in order to save children from being abused. As literary research, the paper aims to examine child abuse in America and Indonesia as reflected in literary works. This research used a descriptive qualitative method with content analysis technique done by taking the flow model followed by data reduction, data presentation, and conclusions. The analysis used sociological theory to reflect on child abuse and comparative literary model to reveal the phenomenon both in American and Indonesian literary works. The sources of research data were “Flowers in The Attic” an American novel written by V.C Andrews and “The Dancer” an Indonesian novel written by Ahmad Tohari which was originally titled “Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk.” The story is closely related to the tradition of dance in Indonesian culture. The results of the study were as follows. First, both novels revealed child abuse, namely physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. Second, literary work has important role to show social phenomena.