Japan diet OKs bills to enhance measures against child abuse

June 19, 2019

Tokyo--The Diet, Japan's parliament, enacted Wednesday bills that are aimed at better preventing child abuse by making it easier for child consultation centers across the nation to step into mistreatment cases, including suspected cases, without hesitation.

The bills to revise the child welfare act and other legislation call for clearly separating the roles of consultation center employees into two--intervention in abuse cases and support for rehabilitating abusive parents.

Physical punishment by parents will be banned in order to prevent abuse-related deaths of children, mainly infants, although no penalties will be set.

The separation of the two functions and the ban on corporal punishment are set to take effect in April next year.

In addition, each child consultation center will be required to have a doctor and a health nurse, from April 2022.

The government-sponsored bills were approved unanimously at a plenary meeting of the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of the Diet, on Wednesday, following their passage through the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, late last month.

Under the revised laws, the tasks of taking children abused by their parents or other guardians, including in suspected cases, into protective custody and providing rehabilitation support to the abusers will be carried out by different workers at child consultation centers.

So far, there have been cases in which staff workers at consultation centers hesitated to take possible victims into custody as they paid too much attention to relations with their parents.

Also, a study will be made on a proposal to give abused children an opportunity to express their opinions to consultation center staff when they are taken into protective custody, a step designed to respect their will regarding how they like to be treated.

Relating to the ban on physical punishment, the amended laws stipulate that the Civil Code provision on the parental disciplinary right, granted within the boundaries of what is necessary to educate and supervise children, be reviewed in two years.

Justice Minister Takashi Yamashita has announced a plan to ask the Legislative Council, which advises the minister, to discuss the review of the right, which has been criticized as being misused to justify child abuse in some cases.

Through coordination between the ruling and opposition camps on a modification of the bills during debates at the Lower House, a provision calling for efforts to provide abusive parents with guidance based on medical or psychological knowledge was added in order to help prevent a repetition of abuse.

The government will help accelerate the installation of child consultation centers in cities having a population of 200,000 or more and Tokyo's 23 special wards in five years of the revised laws' entry into force by providing them with personnel training and other support.

Currently, all 47 prefectures of the country and ordinance-designated cities, with a population of 500,000 or more, are obliged to have such centers. Jiji Press