The Vested Interests vs. Children's Rights:
Children's Rights and Foster Care in Japan
大人の既得権益と子どもの権利
TSUZAKI Tetsuo PhD
Professor of Child Care Social Work
Kyoto
Prefectural University
JAPAN
京都府立大学福祉社会学部 教授 津崎哲雄（社会学博士）
（注：和文原稿はありません）
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Introduction
The author
would like to define the term ‘child in need’ as child who could not live
together with his/her parent/s needing state/social care provided by directly
or indirectly by state, central or local governments. That is the child in the
category of the CRC, Article 20. In other word, the children who are deprived
of normal family life because of various reasons such as abuse/neglect,
abandonment, parent’s death, divorce, ill health, economic reasons and so on.
There are many other children who are in state care but live with parents. They
are handicapped or disabled children, delinquents, truants, children of single
parent household whom the author excludes in this paper
because of limitation of spaces and pages, though some of them are placed in residential
child welfare institutions. The reasons for these children being separated from
their parent/s vary much from classical, such as parental death, abandonment,
to current phenomena, domestic abuse/neglect by caretaker or relevant adults.
According to some, 3 out of 4 residents in children’s homes are one way or
another victim of abuse/neglect. This is reflecting the trend in Japan’s child
welfare that concentrates on prevention of domestic child abuse and neglect in
terms of resource allocation as well as policy inputs as we see later in this
paper.
A British social anthropologist, after researching Japan’s child
welfare policy and practice by a year long fieldwork notes that children in
Japanese state care is one of the most disadvantaged and most recently appeared
minority group of the socially excluded population in Japan. The state with
second strongest super economic power in free world has been treating children
in her care in the way described in the following chapters.
1 The
child in need of state care in Japan
1)
1945-1995
The war
defeat in 1945 caused unprecedented scale of social turmoil in Japan and
people were in sheer needs of daily survival, looking for food and shelter in every
part of urban areas. The war orphans and street waifs were the first target to
be made a large scale roundup and were put away in orphanages and shelters. In
the periods immediately after the 2nd World War, many orphanages
were set up to cope with those who lost normal family life by the War. Foster
care existed even in prewar period and yet it could not have been used until
the enactment of Child Welfare Law 1947 in which foster care was legalized as
an option to care for these orphans and waifs. Since then foster care increased
up to the highest placement rate in 1955-60 where one in two children in care
were placed with foster families. This period is called Golden Age of Foster
Care in Japan.
Since then the placement rate has been decreased year by year until the
discovery of domestic child abuse in the early 1990s. Over the last half a
century after the War, roughly 5 to 7 children out of 100 children in care were
in residential care that have been managed by voluntary or private
organizations approved by state authority.
Who were
then these children in need of state care? All the formal statistics described
them as those children who could not live with their parent/s because of the
following reason/s: parental death, missing, divorce, unmarried parentage,
marital conflict, imprisonment, hospitalization, ill-health (particularly
psychiatric), abandonment, bankruptcy, refusal to care and so on. One
outstanding feature of these reasons is the fact that domestic child abuse and
neglect were excluded from these reasons resulting in that any formal
statistics was rarely collected on the issue of any form of child abuse and
neglect both in domestic and residential settings. The date collection just
commenced from 1990.
These
children in state care were placed exclusively in residential institution of
various types categorized by the type of clientele. The clientile included
deprived child, delinquents, handicapped/disabled, emotionally disturbed,
truants and child in single parenthood. The numbers of these clientele and
residential institutions is shown in the next chapter.
2) 1995-Today
The most important single episode in Japan's child welfare over last few
decades has been the discovery of domestic (and then residential and subsequently foster) child abuse in 1990. The number of
cases referred to child guidance centres increased dramatically from 1101 in
1990 to 33408 in 2004. To cope with this issue, Child Abuse Prevention Law was
enacted in 2000. It made state intervention much easier and more frequent than
before, promoting police and legal professions involvement in abuse cases. So
the number of compulsory separation cases has been increasing enormously over
the years. The Law was reviewed and reformed in 2004 so that the definition of
abuse and neglect has been broadened while the length of compulsory placement
legally set by Court. There are other new provisions in the new Law. As the
state (in reality a local authority of a prefectural council level) intervenes
into private household to safeguard the welfare of the abused child, it has to
assess the risk and need of the child to decide the best possible care plan for
the child. It is the task of Local Council Child Guidance Centre. Given the
result of the assessment requires to move the child from the adult carer, child
social worker of the Centre has to find the most appropriate resource to meet
the needs of the child, whether in residential institution or in foster home in
accordance with the care plan.
Table
1 Number of Child Abuse Cases Referred to Child Guidance
Centres in Japan
1990-2005
Source:
Ministry of Health,Welfare and Labour(1990-2006) Return to MHWL by Local
Authorities
|
1990
|
1995
|
1997
|
1999
|
2000
|
2001
|
2002
|
2004
|
2005
|
|
1101
|
2722
|
5352
|
11631
|
17725
|
23274
|
23738
|
33408
|
34451
|
Thus the discovery of
domestic abuse/neglect and the state measure to cope with this problem led to
ever increasing population of abused and neglected children in state care in Japan. However,
the state has found the care resource insufficient to cope with this
unprecedented demand. So the state recommends to set up more new children’s
homes, while emphasizing the need to explore foster care in order to fill the
gap between supply and demand.
2 Basic statistics on
child in need of state
care
Currently Japan has the population of about
127000 thousands of which around 18% is under 18, that is about 22500
thousands. Of these about 40000 are the children and young people under 18 who
are cared for by the state authority in the accommodation of foster care and
three main residential institutions. This figure excludes the number of
children placed in Homes for Supporting Single Mothers and Children with the
resident-households of 11608 in 2004. The breakdown of this figure from 1975 to
2004 is as follows;
Table 2 Numbers of Homes and
Residents of Three Main Child Welfare Institutions
Source：MHWL(1975-2004)Annual Returns from Local Authorities
Welfare Statistics
|
Home Types
|
Numbers
|
1975
|
1980
|
1985
|
1990
|
1995
|
2000
|
2004
|
|
Children’s Homes
|
Homes
|
525
|
531
|
538
|
533
|
528
|
552
|
556
|
|
|
Residents
|
30084
|
30787
|
30717
|
27423
|
25741
|
28913
|
30597
|
|
Baby
homes
|
Homes
|
129
|
125
|
122
|
118
|
116
|
114
|
117
|
|
|
Residents
|
3292
|
2945
|
3004
|
2599
|
2566
|
2784
|
2938
|
|
Delinquents
Homes
|
Homes
|
58
|
58
|
57
|
57
|
57
|
57
|
58
|
|
|
Residents
|
2844
|
2779
|
2696
|
2029
|
1755
|
1790
|
1872
|
|
Total
|
Homes
|
712
|
714
|
717
|
708
|
701
|
723
|
731
|
|
Institutions
|
Residents
|
36220
|
36511
|
36417
|
32051
|
30062
|
33487
|
35407
|
|
Fostering
|
Fostered Children
|
3851
|
3188
|
3322
|
2876
|
2377
|
2157
|
3022
|
Table 3 Numbers of Homes and Residents Households of Homes
for Supporting
Single Mothers and Children 1975-2004 Source：MHWL ibid
|
|
Number
of Homes
|
1975
424
|
1980
369
|
1985
348
|
1990
327
|
1995
309
|
2000
290
|
2004
285
|
|
|
Number of
Households
|
16152
|
13993
|
14753
|
11936
|
11245
|
11555
|
11608
|
There are
currently about 3000 children cared for in fostering in Japan, while the number of registered
foster carers is around 7500 of which only 2200 actually have placement of children.
The number of fostered children has decreased dramatically since 1960,though
slightly increasing last few years as seen in Table 3. Remaining 5300
registered cares seem to have been waiting for the best candidate kid of their
favour to make them their heir through adoption. Strictly speaking this type of
registered carers could not be treated foster carer in Anglo-American, even
Korean sense of the term.
Table 4
Numbers of Registered Foster Carers,RFCs with
Placement and Fostered Children 1960-2004 Source : MHWL,ibid.
|
|
1960
|
1965
|
1970
|
1975
|
1980
|
1985
|
1990
|
1995
|
2000
|
2001
|
2002
|
2003
|
2004
|
|
RFC*
|
19022
|
18230
|
13621
|
10230
|
8933
|
8659
|
8046
|
8059
|
7403
|
7372
|
7161
|
7285
|
7542
|
|
RFCP**
|
7751
|
6090
|
4075
|
3225
|
2646
|
2627
|
2312
|
1940
|
1699
|
1729
|
1873
|
2015
|
2184
|
|
FCn***
|
8737
|
6909
|
4729
|
3851
|
3188
|
3322
|
2876
|
2377
|
2157
|
2211
|
2517
|
2811
|
3022
|
* Registered Foster Carers ** RFCs
with Placement *** Fostered Children
3 Japan’s general
policy for child in state care:
residential
care overwhelms foster care
1) Imbalance between residential and foster care as placement option
In Japan residential
care has been exclusively relied on to meet the needs of children in sate care. Taking
state care of children by local authority means in reality placing children and young persons in
residential institutions, while fostering as a resource remains just a
tokenistic symbol of modern state, so extremely marginalized in the history of
child welfare in Japan.
The child and
parent/s have virtually no choice for placement other than in residential
institutions. This is in sheer conflict with the principle in the UN Convention
on the Rights of the Child Article 20 Section 3. It pre-supposes the priority
for so called family placement including fostering and adoption over
residential care. It requires that residential care could only be used if it is
necessary on some conditions. Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labour, the
responsible central government department (MHWL) does not seem to have
recognised the serious implication of this Article in child welfare policy. The
Government did not make no reference to this imbalance when it sent the First
Performance Report on the Convention to the UN Committee of Children's Right in
1999. The UN Committee scrutinised what Japan did to implement the
provisions of the Convention and it criticized and recommended to reform the
structural imbalance between residential and family placements stipulated in
the Article 20. There has been continuing controversy over why this
imbalance has not been challenged and changed till today since 1940s.In 2004 the
UN Committee reported back again the same criticism and recommendation against
the Second National Performance Report by the Japanese Government.
As seen before, directed by the sheer increase of abuse cases by
the discovery in early 1990s, Japanese Government has had to find the placement
resource for meeting the needs of separated children from abuser adult.
Residential children’s homes have been full in their capacity since mid 1990s.
MHWL therefore decided to mobilize the unused resource of the registered foster
carers who have been approved and registered but never been placed any child /
children for a long while. As indicated in Table 4 there are about 7500
registered foster carers in 2004 but only 2200 carers have been placed any
foster child. Remaining 5300 carers, that is 70% of fostering resource, have
had no placement ever before. The reason for this is not difficult to explain.
They would like to adopt certain type of child who satisfies their conditions
to make the child their heir. So they became foster carer to look for the most
suitable child of their favour. They therefore should be called would–be
adopter-foster carer in real sense of the term. For that reason they choose
and select the child strictly for their own best interest, not for the child
best interest, subsequently have been waiting for long time the most suitable
kid to appear. The legal review of the approved foster carers takes place every
five years and most carers could renew it even if they had no placement ever at
all since the approval.
2) Unprofessional System of Sate Field Social Work
In addition to the
problematic factors in state policy for fostering an issue of key importance
has prevailed in state system of child welfare. There is no room in this paper
to discuss it in detail, so mentioning here it very briefly. That is the issue
of the system of state field social work,
to put it in the UK
term, local authority social work with professional education and training,
qualification, status, deployment, and societal recognition. Japan has no
equivalent of British / North American state social work system. No local authority social work
department exists in the strict sense of the term if scrutinized by the
professionals or academics from these countries. The local authority officers
taking social work role are often unprofessional public employees who prefers
putting away these children into residential institutions to placing them in
foster carers.
This is the most fundamental and
difficult issue when we consider the national trait of child welfare policy and
practice. This issue was vividly come out in the tragedy of a foster girl’s
death by abuse by foster mother in 2001 that took place in a region in central Japan. A foster
placement was made by a child guidance centre. The child died abused by foster
mother who seemed to have been isolated and could not cope with demanding task
in caring for the girl who spent a few years in a baby home before placed with
the mother. The social worker who placed the girl did not visit the foster home
for 4 months after placement. She visited them just a couple of days before the
death of the girl. She could not find or smell any sign of persistent abusive
conducts by the mother. Without professional state field social work most cases
of children in need of state care are disposed routinely by
unprofessional local government officers who happened to occupy the posts to
deal with these cases in child guidance centers all over Japan. Despite
the posts indeed have key role for securing the safety and the best interests
of many children in state care, the manpower policy has failed to reflect the
imperative requirement to ensure that adequate professional staff should be
deployed in this field of operation.
This has been the most fundamental
failure in the system of social work / services in Japan over the last half century.
Fortunately since the discovery of domestic child abuse in the early 1990s most
relevant sectors have been realizing the problem and just about to set off to reform
the system to catch up with these civilized countries in the future. The
present author thinks that it would take a few decades or more before Japan’s state
field social work catches up with Anglo-American professional model, or even with Korean model.
4 Foster care
policy: fostering as residual or/and tokenistic gesture, risk management tool=safety
valve in Japan
Since the defeat of 2nd World War there has been a
fostering policy in Japan
that is quite bizarre to the eyes of professional people within as well as
outside Japan.
Though there was a period, particularly in 1950s and early 60s when family
placement had been considered to be better option for children deprived of
normal family life. It was the period of psychoanalytic influence from John
Bowlby and others in the post war period. Downsizing the scale of children’s
homes as well as promotion of fostering and adoption had been shouted amongst
professionals and advocated amongst academics. This climate was making
residential care sector unpopular and even felt damaging. However what happened
by the climate was that the proprietors of private children’s homes concerned
the risk of bankruptcy of their business if they were forced to downsize the
scale of the establishment, along with the state policy to promote the family
placement. By the mid 1950s the business of running children’s homes had been
well established in the name of charitable effort for unhappy children and
young persons. Most homes were and have been private, run by a founder family
successively. After the War defeat in 1945 Japanese Government asked many
voluntary individuals and organizations to set up children’s homes to cope with
the unprecedented demands of war orphans and street waifs deprived of normal
family life. To the Government, this saved capital budgets for child welfare.
Instead it started to pay for a monthly placement money per a child to these
institutions, as a form of commissioning the state duty to private sector. The
system has been in operation for more than half a century, leaving no legal and
professional initiative to promote the family placement whatsoever. Given the
family placement initiatives had been introduced at that time, the current
picture must have been quite different from what exists at the moment. State
policy therefore could not have been based on the real needs of these
recipients of the state child care services but rather on the demand of
business by the proprietors of private residential institutions. That also
explains why the average size of children’s homes is so large, accommodating
50-60 residents aged 0-18(sometimes up to 20) in a dormitory or barrack type
establishments. Some still accommodate 150-200 inmates in huge establishments,
mainly managed by religious agencies. It also reveals the reason why the
staff-child ratio instituted in the State Minimum Standards of Child Welfare
Institutions has been so badly low, 1:2 for under three, 1:4 for under six and
1:6 for school age (primary school to high school).
An aforementioned British
social anthropologist examined this reality through his fieldwork and concludes
that Japanese system has been almost of Victorian orphanages. Of all children’s homes run by public
authority are one in ten. And the number of public homes has been decreasing
year by year despite the gradual increase in the number of private homes, in
spite of the fact that generally working conditions for staff in public home is
much better than in private homes.
Thus the needs of children
in state care have been formulated and the service provision has been
determined (namely both have been socially constructed in the postmodern
terms), by the supply-side’s demands and the vested interest of the proprietors
of private residential care homes. One of the eminent researchers in public
administration is rightly pointed out that the very nature of Japanese social
welfare administration since the defeat of the Asia-Pacific War in 1945 has
been charactersed by the term ‘Voluntary and Private Services Providers’
Protectionistm’. The term depicts clearly
the State (Central and Local Governments) Priority approach to protect the
vested interests of the service providers over the real needs of the receiving
ends of social services in Japan.
This could be supported by what one of the highest bureaucrats in MHWL
confessed at a public meeting in 1996. According to an attendant at the meeting
the Director of Child and Family Welfare Division of MHWL told honestly that he
never knew at all that the rights of service users (in this context means
children & families in need of state care) should be considered seriously
and respected in the policy-making and service administration.
His naïve confession was made when MHWL consulted with the proprietors of
voluntary children’s homes on the term of major legislative reform influenced
by the Japan’s
ratification of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child in 1994. This is
not a joke but the sheer reality of the human , therefore children’s rights
situation in Japan
in mid 1990s!
This sort of social climate in social
welfare provisions has been going on and on under the name of quasi social
market principle, while most other sectors in personal social services such as
elderly and disabled have been exposed to sheer market principle nowadays to
pursue value for money. Fostering as a main alternative to residential care has
therefore been neglected, marginalized and never been on a major policy or
political agenda for professionals as well as for politicians over last half a
century in Japan.
In later 1950s and early 1960s, to take
an example, there was sheer shortage of day care provisions for preschool
children of working mothers. Then fostering was used as an alternative to day
nurseries until day care facilities caught up with the increasing demands from
every sectors including labour unions, corporation governors and various
women’s organizations. The fostering in that sense was called day fostering and
played a role of childminding in the British sense of the term. However, when
day care provisions reached to the level at which most working mothers could
get day care place, the policy to use fostering as an alternative to day care
was terminated. This was the only
occasion in the history of fostering that it appeared on the political and
social agenda. Since then fostering has been out of sight for last half a
century until it has been made a social and political agenda to cope with ever
increasing population of abused children separated legally from their parents.
To put it in a metaphor Japan’s state
policy for fostering has been a sort of
safety valve in risk management, to cope with the shortage of other major
resources. Once the shortage was over, it disappeared and was forgotten at all.
It is something like a risk management tool to be employed by the senior
administrators, bureaucrats in the central and local governments. This explains
why fostering in Japan
has been so marginalized and neglected for ages. And this naturally leads to a
conclusion that unlike any other civilized countries there has been no, very
few if any, recognition of the value and significance of fostering as a
placement resource for children in need of state care in Japan. Therefore the supply-side demands overrides
the best possible provision to meet the real needs of looked after children and
this has been the most essential feature of Japan’s child protection / care
system. In other words, residential care has been dominating the quasi
social market in Japan’s
child care provisions, leaving foster care residual, marginalized resource and
even just a tokenistic symbol that exists in an Oriental Welfare State called Japan. The
bottom part of Table 2 above depicts the fact vividly! Over the last half a
century roughly only one in ten cildren in state care have been placed with
foster carers while nine in Vitorian institutions in terms of size of unit,
manpower deployment,quality of service and of all regime as total institution.
In 2001 MHWL reformed Fostering System
with new Regulations to go
forward with the plan to mobilize the unused foster carers. New regulations has
new provisions, including separating mainstream (child welfare) foster carers
from would-be adopter foster carers, introducing specialist foster carers for
meeting the needs of abuse cases, providing respite care to foster carers, and
setting minimum standards for fostering. And the reward part of payment to
specialist carers tripled from JY29000 to 90000 per month but this amount could
be one third or fourth of the average salary of residential care staff. Foster
carers have been treated as volunteer till now and will be so for mainstream
foster carers in the future.
5 Implementing the CRC “Children First” in Japan:
Concluding remark
What kinds of strategies and movements should
be implemented to carry on the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Japan,
particularly of children in state care? As described so far, it has been a
tokenistic gesture for Japanese Government to have adopted the CRC in 1994.
Though some progress has been made in education and law, there have been few
progress in the state care for deprived children, except some marginal policy
developments. They include introduction of advocacy mechanism within and
outside institutions as well as in foster homes. Children can now complain and
speak up if they feel unhappy or/and abused /neglected in the state care. They are now provided a sort of
children’s rights guidance note when they commence the state care carrier in
which general information of their human rights is explained together with
emergency contact addresses of advocacy agencies and persons in charge by phone
call or writing a letter.
In the context of children’s right, it
would be worth while to touch on a movement that aimed to promote the rights of
children In state care, but unfortunately
terminated by the vested interests of abusers of state child care system. It
was called Who Cares? Japan Project started in mid 1980s and terminated in late
1990. It literally was called National Annual Residential Workshop of High
School Residents in Children’s Homes in Japan. It was based on the British
model of Who Cares? Movement pioneered by relevant professionals in late 1970s.
This workshop provided attendants the opportunity to speak out what they find
and how they feel in state care, particularly having compared their own homes
with other homes. They often found the sheer differences between homes in terms
of quality of services, pocket money, chance for higher education, regime of
living and so on. This was one of the best innovations for children in state
care to realize the Article 12 in the CRC to express or speak out their views
and to be taken them seriously. However it was terminated in late 1990s by the
vested interests of proprietors of private children’s homes who sent these high
school children to the workshop. After the ratification of The CRC by Japanese
Government 1994, the workshop tried to inform attendants of the CRC, their
rights to express their view, not to be discriminated, nor to be abused /
neglected. Some attended children empowered by the knowledge of The CRC
returned to their homes and found the regime very abusive and violating their
rights, resulting in informing their complaints to a local press by phone call.
Thus the abusive regime in the home was widely and nationally reported by the
press. The result was not to promote this workshop to further the rights of
children in institutions but rather odd reaction from the National Association
of the Proprietors of Children’s Homes in Japan. The Association decided not
support the workshop and pulled out from its commitment to promote the rights
of residents to speak out, by not sending any high school children to the
workshop. The Association feared the revelation of their regime within homes by
these children if they attended and were empowered. The state authority has had any reaction
to this shameful action taken by the proprietors, most of whom have been owners
of so called the inherited family business in child welfare. Their vested
interests of inherited family business should have not been lost by the voice
of empowered children in their care. Government officials were totally silent
and apathetic towards this episode, suggesting implicitly where stand and whom
they support.
This episode vividly shows the very
nature of child welfare situation in Japan where the vested interests
overrides the best interests of children in sate care. We have to face this
problematic reality along with the fact that main grade field social workers in
local authority child guidance centres across Japan are unprofessional, who could
never deal appropriately with the cases of children in need of state care in
any sense of the term. We Japanese have to consider the latter issue taking
seriously into account of Korean experiment in foster care that has been
developing since 2000 through legal as well as organizational reform. One of the ways to resolve the latter
issue lies in adopting the option Korean colleagues took so far. That is
commissioning the role of field social work function in foster care to
voluntary agencies as happened in Korea. If Japan keeps on
foster care
as it is now, there would be no chance
to catch up with civilized states , even with Korea in another hundred years.
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Children’s Department 1948-1971,National Institute of Social
Work,
London
(Translated by Tsuzaki in 2001,Akashi Syoten)
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Foster Care in The UK’, in Yuzawa
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Foster care in 12 Countries, Minerva Publishing, Kyoto,pp.1-29
Tsuzaki T.(2003)’Failure of Japan’s Child Protection System:A
Revelation by the First National Scandal of A Foster Child’s Death by Abuse’
Proceedings of 9th ISPCAN European Congress on Child Abuse and
Neglect,Polish Organising Society,pp.185-86
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T.(2004)’Failure
of Japan’s Child Protection System: Disclosed State Failure and Unprofessional
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by Abuse’ Proceedings of 15th ISPCAN Congress on Child Abuse and
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of Child/Family Studies(2006)
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of the Child(1998)Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 44
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the Child;Japan,CRC/C/15/Add.90 June 1998
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