The death from starvation of a Japanese teenager this week has prompted another round of soul-searching over the dramatic rise in child abuse and the lack of help available for the victims and their abusers.
Paramedics found the emaciated body of the 19-year-old boy, who cannot be named because he is still a minor, at his mother's home in Osaka last Monday. Though he was over 180cm tall, he weighed just 32kg when he died.
His 48-year-old mother, arrested on suspicion of child negligence, said her son had starting refusing meals three weeks earlier and would drink only water. She said she could not afford to take him to hospital, even after he became seriously ill.
The boy's death came just weeks after official statistics showed that cases of reported child abuse had risen more than 20-fold in the past 10 years, shocking a country that long both silenced the problem and believed it was immune to the levels of abuse seen in the West.
Last year, there were a record 23,738 cases of child abuse, up almost 2 percent from 2002, according to the Cabinet office. About half involved violence and 40 percent neglect by parents or guardians. Child welfare centers also reported a record number of calls: 26,573 connected with child abuse, an increase of 2,800 from 2002.
The local media have been reporting harrowing cases of abuse for several years, but the biggest jolt to public complacency came earlier this year when a man and his girlfriend were accused of attempting to starve his 15-year-old son to death.
The boy had been locked in a dark room and fed only once every three days. He was regularly punched and kicked and his body was covered in dozens of cigarette burns. Local welfare officials were criticized for failing to help the boy, whose weight had dropped from 41kg to 24kg when, last November, he lapsed into a coma from which he has not recovered.
In other cases to make the headlines, a couple were caught trying to leave their five-month-old baby inside a coin-operated locker while they dined out, and this week a man was arrested for allegedly leaving his two-year-old son to die of heatstroke in a locked car while he went gambling.
Neighbors and authorities appear more inclined to report abuse than in the past, which partly explains the rise in cases.
"Awareness of child abuse is growing," said Jun Saimura of the Child and Family Research Institute. "But there are still many more cases out there that go unreported. We just do not know what the real figure is."
Saimura said more official help is needed to prevent parents from allowing their emotions to boil over into violence.
"The key is stopping the abuse before it starts by helping parents who have not harmed their children but feel that they are struggling to keep a grip on things," he said.
"There are more advice centers than there were, but they are still overstretched and staff cannot give each case as much attention as they would like. Unfortunately I think the figures will continue to rise for the time being," he said.
Japan will have to brace itself for more horror stories until it ditches its traditional reluctance to interfere in others' "private" lives, Masaaki Noda, a professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, warned in a recent article.
Noda accused Japanese society of condoning violence against children. "Society itself is abusing children," he said.
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