Staff hard-pressed, poorly funded to deal with inrush of abused kids

Japan: Child welfare facilities overstretched

It's hard to imagine that the two young boys who charged into the room and almost smothered Toshikazu Takahashi with affection had from infancy until two years ago lived a life of constant severe abuse at the hands of their parents.

Toshikazu Takahashi, a professor of welfare at Hosei University and head of the Shisei Gakuen children's home in Tachikawa, western Tokyo, plays with two of his charges in a sandbox normally used for psychological therapy.  As the 10-year-old boy giggled and the 8-year-old hugged him tightly, Takahashi, who runs Shisei Gakuen, a facility for homeless and maltreated children in Tachikawa, western Tokyo, said: “These two boys have gone through especially serious cases (of abuse). I wish I could spend more time with them.”

With that, he hurried away from his children's home to a family court, where a case involving other kids from his facility was being processed.

Although Takahashi's efforts to get troubled kids to open up and to turn their lives around seem to be paying off, like many others involved in the same endeavor he is stretched beyond capacity and the children keep coming.

Experts warn that not only are welfare facilities stretched to the limit, but so are many care workers — a scenario that has seen, in worst cases, abuses taking place at the very facilities that are supposed to help mistreated children. Money is another problem, as many facilities, as well as staff, are underfunded.

In 2001, there were 38,378 children in Japan who, for one reason or another, were unable to live with their parents, and 80 percent of them lived in facilities for homeless or mistreated kids. According to Masayuki Odaka, an official in the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry's Children and Family Bureau, many such homes originally started as facilities for orphans who lost parents during the war.

But by the 1980s, kids who were separated from their parents due to abuse or other problems started to make up the majority of those accommodated at such facilities. “The homes had to take on a different role from the one that was originally intended,” he said. “The staff became burned out and the children were unable to receive adequate care.”

Recent statistics by a council of children's homes shows that as many as 70 percent of the charges at those facilities have been physically or psychologically abused by parents or guardians. The abuses ranged from beatings to sexual assault to neglect. The health ministry, welfare experts and lawmakers are now contemplating measures to improve the situation at the facilities as part of an evaluation, slated for this fall, of the 2000 Child Abuse Prevention Law.

Measures now under consideration include adding more but smaller facilities capable of providing more attention to each child, increasing the number of professionally trained staff and promoting foster parenting, which experts say is a better solution and much more common in the West.

Other measures being considered include increasing the minimum space allocated for each child at the facilities. The current 3.3 sq. meters is the same allotted to a detention house inmate.

Social Democratic Party lawmaker Nobuto Hosaka, who is leading a nonpartisan team of politicians to revise the law, said, “When children come to the homes, they are brought to a new stage of misery as they are not allowed to bring belongings they are fond of, like stuffed animals, and are crowded together in group rooms due to the space constraints. Something has to be done about it.”

In 1994, there were 26,929 kids living in 529 children's homes, bringing the facilities to 80.6 percent of capacity. In 2001, 30,456 children were being accommodated at 550 facilities, or 90.3 percent of capacity, which Odaka claims is due to the increase in kids who had been abused by parents.

That such homes must take care of children with different types of problems — including kids who lost their parents and those who were abused — means more specialists are needed, such as clinical psychologists. Current staffing rules for these facilities, however, are seen as lacking.

The health ministry requires that for every six school-age kids at a children's home, there must be one general staff member. There are no precise rules for specially trained personnel, such as psychotherapists. Current rules only stipulate that a psychotherapist must be assigned to a given facility if 10 of the charges are in need of such care, as deemed by the head of either a prefectural or major metropolitan child guidance center. In 2002, psychotherapists were assigned to 233 homes.

Many facilities' children, especially those who had been abused, often become aggressive toward care-workers as well as the other kids. Many such kids are in these homes because their parents separated, or disappeared, or abused them, and thus they question the meaning of their own existence, welfare experts say. Then there are parents who try to remove their children from the facilities by force, a situation that makes some care-workers feel as if they are working in a field hospital.

Takahashi of Shisei Gakuen feels that not just the troubled kids but children's home personnel suffer emotional wounds they hadn't banked on, and thus are in need themselves of psychological care. Beyond the internal tasks of providing care, there's also the outside responsibilities children's facilities must bear, he said.

Takahashi, for example, routinely has to take in family court cases that involve children at the homes and their parents, and he makes regular visits to schools where many of the home's 73 children attend, to smooth things over when some of them resort to violence against other students or have other behavioral problems due to their emotional scars. Then there is the ever-present financial factor, and the quest for adequate funding.

Heads of children's homes like Takahashi occasionally find themselves, when no one else steps forward, acting as guarantors for departing charges when they enter college, land a job or rent an apartment. Some facility heads find themselves deep in debt when children they guarantee get into trouble, which can include crime, property damage or financial default. Takahashi said he has paid out some 3 million yen over the last 30 years on behalf of the former charges who failed to pay their rent or disappeared after incurring debts.

Because the Child Welfare Law applies to people under 18, children's homes legally only need to take care of those who are 17 or younger. But in reality, it is difficult for an 18 year-old to start making a living, thus Shisei Gakuen, like other facilities, allow older charges to stay on even though government support is cut off after they become 18. “There is no legal obligation to become a guarantor or take care of children after they turn 18, but I feel a moral obligation,” Takahashi said. “I feel responsible as the one who raised them.”

Children's homes are either run as public institutions or private social welfare foundations and are funded by the government. But since the funding covers only minimum expenses sufficient to provide the basic necessities and to enable the children to receive an education up to high school, most of the homes cannot make ends meet without additional revenue, including prefectural and municipal government subsidies and private donations, he said, indicating the quest for funds is never-ending.

There are also occasional abuses at child welfare facilities themselves. In 2000, the head of Oncho-en, a facility in Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture, was arrested following revelations that he and his staff had been abusing the children there. The director was later sentenced to eight months in prison, while his son, who was one of the care-workers, was given a four-year term for raping an elementary school girl at the facility. Other kids had been beaten with a metal baseball bat, or thrown head first into a kitchen trash can, or tossed around in a clothes dryer.

At Kamakura Hoikuen in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, in 1999, small children were reportedly fed like animals for the sake of the staff's convenience. The kids were first spoon-fed all of the side dishes, then the rice, then the soup, media reports alleged. In the same facility, teenage girls who were deemed rebellious were banned from leaving their rooms except when they were at school, and their belongings were inspected without their consent, according to the reports, which prompted the prefectural government to order the facility to clean up its act.

On why guardians, whether institutional or parental, may resort to physical abuse, professor Yasuo Matsubara of Meiji Gakuin University, an expert on social welfare issues, said that historically corporal punishment was not considered a bad thing in Japan or elsewhere as a means of disciplining children.

“But the fact that many facilities are often closed to the outside world, even beyond the scrutiny of their communities, with many staff members living on the premises, may be a reason why abuses have persisted,” he said.

Takahashi said that both Oncho-en and Kamakura Hoikuen had their own problems, noting the Oncho-en head himself had been an abused child. But any facility can have similar problems.

“The nature of children's problems have changed in such a way that the facilities can no longer handle them the way they once did,” he said. “Their staff lack the necessary skills, and in many cases because they are in too short a supply, they cannot be sent away for training.”

Many care-workers suffer from both overwork and low wages, lessening their motivation, Takahashi added, noting the health ministry requirement of one care-worker per six school-age children is far from sufficient, given the difficult nature of children's problems today. According to Takahashi, roughly 30 percent of children's homes nationwide employ additional staff at their own expense.

Professor Matsubara, who has also been advising child guidance centers for 20 years, said that caring for children in smaller facilities, with more support and supervision from the government and child guidance centers, will solve many of the problems found at such facilities.

“There are many things that need to be resolved — but the first priority is to consider what is best for the children,” he said.

By Yumi Wijers-Hasegawa
29 August 2003

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20030822b4.htm

home