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Catholic charity counsels kids who witness abuse

"Little Wei's" father's fists were meant only for Little Wei's mother, but every punch to her face was an all-out assault on Little Wei's psychology.

By the time the second-grader and his battered mother had fled to a halfway house, he was but a shell of a boy, said Yu Chia-lin (郁佳霖), Little Wei's social worker from the Good Shepherd Social Welfare Services, a local Catholic charity.

"Little Wei was big for his age when I met him," Yu said, "but, psychologically he was more infant than elementary school student."

Years of witnessing his alcoholic father pummel his mother had hallowed out the boy, rendering him emotionally stunted, Yu said, adding that Little Wei was only one casualty in a massive yet little known epidemic of child abuse.

When most people think of child abuse, she said, they think of direct physical, verbal or sexual abuse -- not the "abuse" of constant exposure to the sights and sounds of parents inflicting pain on each other.

"There is a huge and growing number of children who, after witnessing their parents abuse each other for years, are suffering from a dizzying array of psychological problems," Good Shepherd official Sun Shu-chun (孫淑君) said yesterday during the charity's 20th anniversary press conference to raise awareness of "underage witnesses" to abuse in the home.

According to statistics compiled by the charity, 140,000 children nationwide have witnessed their parents come to blows, with 25,000 children being regularly exposed to such violence at home.

Like Little Wei, "underage witnesses" -- as Good Shepherd has termed them -- tend to lack social skills and fall behind in school, as ghastly nightmares plague their sleep, as a result of what they've seen and heard.

"These kids' minds are truly scarred," said Tang Ching-lien (湯靜蓮), the charity's director. "One nine-year-old who we counseled was tormented by a recurring dream in which his father hacked his mother to death with a meat cleaver."

Sun said government agencies like the Children's Bureau, under the Ministry of the Interior, tend to neglect "underage witnesses" because they haven't been directly abused, making the mission of Good Shepherd to rehabilitate such children all the more imperative.

"We're the only social services charity that caters exclusively to these kinds of abuse cases," she said.

Boyband celebrity Wang Ren-fu (王仁甫) and Wang's agent Sun Te-jung (孫德榮) were on hand yesterday to donate NT$500,000 from Sun's company, saying that the problem of children witnessing domestic abuse had reached epidemic proportions.

Charity officials yesterday said that donations go to counseling children like Little Wei, who, after months of "art therapy" in which he stabbed dinosaur toys with scissors and otherwise creatively vented his fears and anger under Yu's care, had begun to reclaim his childhood.

"We had to teach him how not to be afraid all the time," she said.
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