Earlier this month, the Children and Family Agency released statistics about child abuse in Japan. In 2022, 72 children died as the result of “abuse,” two fewer than in 2021. However, in recent years this statistic has remained pretty much the same with only slight fluctuations, and according to an agency official quoted in an Asahi Shimbun report on the statistic, the number 72 “is still a big problem.”
The term “abuse” in this case should be qualified. Of the 72 deaths of persons under the age of 16, 56 perished of “abuse that did not involve group suicide,” meaning 16 children died at the hands of a parent or parents who committed suicide along with their children, and since minors are not considered to have agency under such circumstances, they were effectively murdered. Breaking the number down further, 25 of the children were less than 1 year old when they died of abuse, and 9 “were killed” on the day they were born. All of these nine babies were “abandoned,” though it isn’t clear from the Asahi report if the children died of actual violence or neglect. Five of the babies were “abandoned by the mother,” one by “both parents,” and the circumstances of the remaining three are unknown. As far as the agency can tell, six of the mothers of these abandoned children had never been examined by a physician while they were pregnant, and 7 were not in possession of the Mother and Child Handbooks that are routinely given to expectant mothers by medical institutions. In only one case did the agency determine that the mother consulted some form of authority about her pregnancy.
The agency’s comment on these statistics acknowledges that some pregnant women and girls need “support” due to poverty or the fact that the pregnancy was unplanned, but doesn’t really offer any solutions. Asahi talked to the head of a psychiatric hospital in Kumamoto Prefecture that works with women who have been convicted of killing and/or abandoning their babies after giving birth alone. The doctor said that such women have a “lower ability to adjust to normal social situations,” a condition known as borderline personality disorder, and tend to have weak or no connections with family and no interaction with authorities, which they don’t tend to trust anyway. A few have been prostitutes, but in any case the “struggles” of these women need to be better understood.
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