RIGHTS-JAPAN: When Parents Turn Bad

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, May 10 1999 (IPS) - “Stop me before I do something awful to my child,” a young woman’s voice screams on the telephone.

It takes some minutes before counsellor Nobuko Nozaki, who received the call, gets the agitated mother to calm down. Then she tells her gently, “Please come and see me. You can talk to me about anything and not be afraid.”

Nozaki is a Tokyo Metropolitan government official working at the Child Care Centre. She says the call she has just taken is only one among close to a hundred similar cries for help that the Centre gets daily.

It also represents the horror of increasing child abuse in Japan, as well as the desperate loneliness of mothers who take out their frustration on their offspring.

“Mothers who seek help actually represent the better side of child abuse,” says Nozaki. “There are a lot of parents out there who won’t stop till they have killed their children.”

Social activists say the Japanese government is finally turning its attention to child abuse after years of ignoring the problem. But indications are Tokyo may have to move fast before the situation gets any worse.

According to a survey released early this year by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, cases of child abuse have risen five-fold since 1990.

In 1997 alone, the total number of reported allegations of such abuse reached a total of almost 6,000. Of these, about 20 percent were classified as serious abuse that resulted in the separation of the children from their parents.

At present, official records show that some 6,000 victims of child abuse are scattered in the 560 children’s shelters nationwide.

Notes Keiko Nomura, a counsellor at the privately run Child Abuse Centre: “The numbers will increase as the issue gets more public attention and people become aware that hitting children is wrong.”

In recent years, the local media have found themselves reporting on more cases of children — some as young as two months old — being starved or battered to death because they would not stop crying, or left out in the snow naked as punishment.

Just last winter, the public was shocked to learn that a young couple had starved their 20-month-old first-born to death simply because the little girl was not as cute as their younger child.

The Health and Welfare Ministry survey showed that the most typical form of violence was severe mental abuse, such as telling young children they should die, or that they are ugly or stupid and unwanted.

Physical violence in the form of hitting, slapping, or kicking their offspring came next, with neglect such as not feeding or failing to get them clothes or medical aid, also among the kinds of abuse reported.

Mothers more than fathers were guilty of most of these abuses, said the ministry survey, although fathers were involved in more cases of sexual abuse or violent physical abuse that resulted in serious harm or the death of children. Most of the parents covered by the survey were between their 20s and 30s.

Child care experts say young parents who resort to violence are often victims of abuse themselves.

Many come from relatively poorer sections of Japanese society. Most also belong to Japan’s pampered younger generation who had been raised with few siblings and grew up to be men and women who turned out to be incapable of taking the hardships of child rearing.

The experts also see a linkage in the country’s rapid urbanisation and the apparently weakened family unit. They add that a society that puts a premium on material things above all else leads to the attitude that children are nothing more than a burden on their parents.

Meanwhile, a civic poll conducted on 500 women and released this week revealed that 70 percent of the respondent-mothers who hit their children belonged to groups that had the “least support” from their husbands.

Some experts interpret this to mean as women having no one to turn to all day and most of the night, since Japanese salarymen are notorious for their long hours at work and their equally long hours unwinding in the company of colleagues afterwards.

Nomura also talks of despondent mothers who cannot talk about their problems with their parents “who belong to a different generation”. Instead, she says, their elders even pressure them “to sacrifice themselves for their families”.

Fortunately, some mothers — and fathers — have ended up getting more than advice from elsewhere.

Since the Child Abuse Centre was first set up in 1991, it has helped more than 23,000 parents, says Nomura. She adds, “We focus on helping parents to confront their actions and help them to reform themselves.”

Nozaki, for her part, says the biggest problem faced by child rights activists and social workers is gathering documentation of the cruelty done by many parents on their children.

“There are no laws that allow us to go ahead and check (up on) families,” she points out. “We have to rely on reports from neighbours, schoolteachers, or hospitals, to gather evidence. We can only ask the police to investigate, when we have ample evidence that abuse is going on in that household.”

Lawyer Fumiaki Isogae, who is working on the issue, thinks that there is need for more preventive legal measures such as requiring people like teachers and doctors to report cases to the police or face a penalty for irresponsibility.

Isogae also says that the government should support more psychiatric counselling for abusive parents since the cost for this treatment can reach 150 dollars per hour.

At the same time, he says, society should learn to allow children to freely seek help without being scared of losing their families.

Indeed, there may be more that authorities, and Japanese society at large, need to do later to abused children. Observes Isogae: “The sudden interest in the issue means we have only begun tackling the tip of the iceberg.”