"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 (
"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 (
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 (
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.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
RSS