(JP) Children's welfare in the doghouse

[Guest guest]

Children's welfare in the doghouse

By PHILIP BRASOR

Japan Times

Sunday, Oct. 29, 2006

 

This past week the nation was shocked by the news of yet another small child who

died at the hands of abusive and negligent adults.

 

In the case of the 3-year-old boy who starved to death in Kyoto, it has been

revealed that the police, alerted by a neighbor last March that the boy's

6-year-old sister was roaming the neighborhood after midnight, brought the girl,

who herself showed signs of possible abuse, to a public-welfare center for

children.

 

The girl was subsequently placed in a facility. However, this fact, in

combination with reports from other neighbors that they heard the boy crying for

food over the past year, didn't lead to police action until it was too late and

the boy was already dead.

 

In such cases, the media always fixes on the victim and the abuser with stories

about the indescribable sufferings of the children and the abominable

selfishness of the guardians. They rarely look at the people in the middle, the

police and other authorities whose job it is to prevent such tragedies. The

question remains: Why does it always get this bad?

 

Clues can be found in another recent news story. On Oct. 4, the Yomiuri Shimbun

reported on a " dog theme park " that opened in Saeki Ward, Hiroshima City in

April of 2003 and closed in May of 2005. Promoted as a place where animal lovers

could interact with a large variety of pure-bred dogs, the Hiroshima Dog Park

was operated by a local " dog-production company. "

 

Due to " bad management, " the park never turned a profit, and after it closed

five employees remained behind to care for about 500 animals confined to cages.

As early as June 2005, a month after the park closed, area residents contacted

the local public animal control center expressing concern over the dogs'

situation. The center reportedly checked the facility five times over the next

year and found the grounds filthy and the food inadequate. The city " verbally

ordered " the operators of the facility to improve conditions 20 times. The

operators did nothing.

 

Finally, in Aug. 2006, the operators placed an advertisement in local newspapers

soliciting people to take the dogs off their hands. Ark Angels, an Osaka-based

animal-welfare group, saw the ad and decided to get involved. Ark Angels'

concern was that the operator would simply give animals away to people dazzled

by the prospect of owning pedigree dogs for free, and that once the reality of

keeping pets became clear the animals would be abandoned or put down.

 

About one thousand people showed up to adopt dogs from the park on the weekend

of Oct. 21-22. Ark Angels also showed up with veterinarians to check the health

of the dogs and with an army of volunteers to grill potential owners on their

suitability to take care of the animals. They were made to sign oaths pledging

they would not abandon their new pets.

 

The coverage of the adoption event in the Yomiuri and Asahi newspapers, as well

as on NHK, centered on the good work of Ark Angels. However, the seriousness of

the animals' circumstances was glossed over. On the Ark Angels' Web site,

volunteers wrote that when they first encountered the dogs in their cages it was

like " entering hell. "

 

Why hadn't the city done anything despite widespread concern that the dogs were

being neglected? In a transcript of an Hiroshima Assembly session recorded by an

interested citizen and posted on the Internet, some revealing aspects of the

matter come to light in terms of the law and the bureaucratic mind-set.

 

Under questioning from the assembly, a representative of the animal control

center said that though he received complaints about the dog park, he couldn't

do anything. The operator would not authorize an " investigation, " and thus the

center could not gather evidence. But surely, the assembly pressed, there was

enough reason to believe that the dogs were being abused or neglected to invoke

the Animal Protection Law.

 

Not necessarily, said the bureaucrat. One has to prove that the abuse is

" malicious " in order to bring a case and they couldn't do that. " Society

recognizes what happened to those dogs as abuse, " the bureaucrat said, " but the

law doesn't. "

 

The bigger question is: Did the animal-control center recognize it as abuse? The

police and the child welfare center in the Kyoto case also claimed they couldn't

do anything about the starving boy even though there was enough reason to

believe that he was being neglected. In the past, it was enough to say that

certain social taboos against interfering in family affairs prevented the

authorities from becoming involved in spousal or child abuse, but awareness of

such abuse has become much greater in recent years and laws have been fortified

to address the issue.

 

The problem is not fuzzy laws, but a lack of imagination. The people who run

public animal control centers and public welfare facilities for children don't

necessarily have any special empathy for their work. They are civil servants who

have been assigned to those jobs. They are taught to work within guidelines.

 

After the child-welfare center in Kyoto received calls from neighbors about the

boy's cries for food, the center simply called the boy's father. A professor of

clinical psychology told the Asahi Shimbun that bureaucrats feel " reassured "

when they receive calls from neighbors because they think it means the community

is keeping an eye on things. When they contacted the father he said nothing was

wrong, and for some strange reason the welfare staff didn't understand that

abusive parents " tend to lie in these situations. "

 

The Hiroshima Dog Park survivors were lucky that Ark Angels, an organization

made up not of civil servants but of people who love animals, stepped in. Maybe

what's needed are non-government organizations that love kids, too.

 

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fd20061029pb.html

 

Ark Angels (In Japanese)

 

http://ark-angels.jp/