The Taipei District Court last month sentenced caregivers Liu Tsai-hsuan (劉彩萱) and Liu Jou-lin (劉若琳) to life and 18 years in prison respectively for abuse leading to death of a one-year-old boy nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴) in 2023. The death of Kai Kai, who was entrusted to the care of home-based nanny Liu Tsai-hsuan by the Child Welfare League Foundation (CWLF), sent shock waves across the nation. What initially appeared to be a case of individual negligence quickly widened into a national reckoning.
The case revealed an uncomfortable truth: Taiwan’s child welfare system, while professionally designed and guided by good intentions, has become fragmented and dangerously overstretched. At the heart of the issue lies the siloed structure of the child welfare and childcare systems. Kai Kai was caught between two disconnected bureaucracies: the adoption placement unit at the CWLF and a local home-based childcare center. While both institutions had protocols for visitation and oversight, neither had formal communication channels with the other. Signs of potential danger thus went unnoticed or unheeded.
Home-based childcare was conceived as a supplementary service — a weekday support for working families, not a replacement for full-time, long-term care. In cases like Kai Kai’s, where the child requires constant care due to family dysfunction or pending adoption, this model is wholly inadequate. Yet, given rising placement demands and the difficulty of recruiting foster families, Taiwan has increasingly relied on home-based nannies to fill the gap. This shift has led to dangerous mismatches between caregiver capacity and child needs. Unlike foster families or institutional group homes that distribute caregiving duties across multiple people, nannies work alone, often without rest or support. In placement cases, this isolation can become overwhelming, and when caregivers feel cornered, the risk of neglect or abuse grows.
Oversight mechanisms exist, but are insufficiently empowered. Inspectors, known as home visitors, often responsible for 60 or more nannies, must conduct upwards of 100 inspections per year. Each visit lasts less than an hour and involves checking dozens of environmental and behavioral factors, from the child’s sleeping posture to the placement of household appliances. Despite their skills and dedication, these professionals operate under intense pressure and without real enforcement power. When they encounter noncompliance or resistance, their only countermeasure is to report it, leaving critical interventions delayed or never acted upon.
The qualifications for becoming a placement nanny are also disturbingly low. In some areas, as little as six hours of training is required. When the bar for entry is so minimal and oversight so toothless, the system cannot claim to be protecting the vulnerable: It is simply hoping nothing goes wrong.
The consequences of this model are visible. Patterns emerging from abuse and fatality cases show consistent red flags: Nannies expressing distress over “difficult” children, isolation and an eventual resort to violence. While some cases lead to convictions, the underlying systemic issues are rarely addressed. Legal punishment after the fact does not bring justice to children who were never safe to begin with. Kai Kai’s death must not be seen as an isolated incident. It is the result of a child welfare system that has become dangerously reliant on convenience over care, and reactive measures over structural reform.
Taiwan must fundamentally rethink how care is delivered, how agencies coordinate and how oversight is implemented. This means investing in more sustainable caregiving models, bolstering the foster care system and limiting the use of home-based nannies for long-term placement. It also means integrating communication between childcare and welfare agencies, increasing the qualifications and support for caregivers, and granting inspectors meaningful authority.
A child’s death should never be the catalyst for reform, but if there is any hope to be drawn from Kai Kai’s loss, it is that it forces the country to confront an uncomfortable truth. Taiwan must not accept fragmented systems and overburdened workers as the cost of child protection. A better system is possible — but only if we are brave enough to build it.
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