Gender Equality

Suffer Little Children

• Byline:OSCAR CHUNG
• Publication Date:03/01/2001

Many people hear the words "child abuse" and
turn away with a shudder, unwilling to confront
one of the darkest sides of society. In Taiwan,
the problem is serious and growing. What is being
done to face down the demons?

"When I first set eyes on her, there were several places on her scalp, about the size of a coin, where all the hair had fallen out. Her mother used to beat her all over." Yang Yueh-tao is talking about a girl she was asked to foster more than a year ago. The girl is now in second grade, and her hair has grown back, but she shows no signs of wanting to go home. "She's not seen her mother since she's been here, and she's never asked to see her," Yang says. "When she's naughty, I tell her I'll send her back to her real mum, and that really works."

Of course, Yang has no intention of carrying out her threat--the girl will go back to her mother only when the social workers responsible for her are satisfied that the time is ripe. "You can't imagine how anyone could be so cruel to her own child until you see the evidence with your own eyes," Yang says. Sadly, her foster child is just one of the many abused children whose numbers continue to rise. According to the Children's Bureau of the Ministry of the Interior, in 1994 nearly 2,200 cases of child abuse were reported to the authorities islandwide. The number climbed steadily to more than 5,300 in 1999.

With the increase in numbers has come a change in the profiles of temporary foster-care cases. Traditionally they involved children whose only problem was that they came from families that were too poor to raise them. Now, more than half of the country's 600-odd approved foster homes are taking in youngsters who have suffered abuse. As Taiwanese have become more prosperous and less worried about providing daily necessities, the way they treat their children seems to have degenerated. On the face of it, this looks odd, but Tsai Pen-yuan, a Children Bureau's division chief, does not find it so.

"Child abuse happens when people are under pressure, irrespective of their social and economic status," Tsai says. He estimates that the actual number of cases is much higher than the official figures suggest, because Taiwanese are reluctant to report such things to the authorities. His potential "client base" is very large: in 1999, children under twelve numbered 3.78 million, or 17 percent of the island's total population. "People are having fewer children, but the number of child-abuse cases is on the increase," Tsai notes. "It's the same in Japan."

Another problem is that Taiwan's criteria for abuse are not always as strict as in the United States. What would strike the average American parent as abuse may be natural discipline in the eyes of many Taiwanese. Traditionally, people in Chinese societies have tended to resort to corporal punishment when raising children. Attitudes in Taiwan are changing--nowadays teachers are forbidden to punish pupils by beating them, for example--but tragedies still occur.

"Taiwanese parents know very well that raising children involves responsibilities, but many of them continue to regard their kids as private property that they can treat however they like," says Yu Ching-mei, director of the Taipei County branch of the Chinese Fund for Children and Families (known for many years simply as CCF). "Another problem is that Taiwanese children are having to make do with less and less living space, especially in the more urbanized areas. As a result, it's easy for friction to build up between them and their parents."

Paradoxically, the reason why so many cases of child abuse are emerging is that society in general is becoming more concerned about the welfare of the young. The media's increased attention to the issue of ill-treated children has helped. More significantly, the Children's Welfare Law now provides that a person who knows a child is being abused but fails to report the facts within twenty-four hours can be fined up to NT$30,000 (US$909). This provision extends to heads of households, relatives, teachers, and medical and nursing personnel--to anyone connected with the victim, in fact, who knows what is going on but turns a blind eye.

Much of the credit for improvements in children's welfare should go to non-profit private organizations such as the CCF, which was founded in 1938 in mainland China and now has its headquarters in Taichung, central Taiwan, plus twenty-three branches islandwide. It was one of the earliest ROC organizations to provide protection for abused children. According to Yu Ching-mei, few people paid much attention to the issue until about the time when the CCF's Taipei County office started to handle child abuse cases, back in 1989. The police were not interested, because they regarded the problem as a domestic matter, and time and time again Yu would hear government officials make comments like: "Taiwan has done so well economically, so how can we have abused our children?"

Yu knew all too well that this was a fallacy. She remembers the fund's chief executive visiting the United States in the late 1980s. On his return he said: "People claim America is a paradise for children, but we still hear of cases of child abuse there."

Another nonprofit organization active in this field is the Child Welfare League Foundation (CWLF). "We organized a task force to deal with the problem of missing children in 1992, after parents who'd lost their children started coming to us for help," says Lee Chao-jung, the foundation's executive secretary. "The parents found that the police weren't putting enough effort into finding their missing children, so the CWLF began to help by posting photographs and related data in the newspapers and on TV."

In 1998, the CWLF and the government jointly established a missing children information bureau in Taichung. This aims to help the police acquire the most up-to-date and accurate information about each case in the shortest possible time, by publicizing details of reported cases on websites and in the media and soliciting clues from the public. According to CWLF data, by December 2000 the cumulative number of reported cases of missing children under the age of eighteen had risen over the years to more than 7,000. Of those, 1,850 have been satisfactorily resolved and the children returned to their parents. The CWLF now has branches in the island's three biggest cities (Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung).

The CWLF and the CCF also help place abused children with adoptive parents and provide training courses for potential adopters. "We always bear the child's welfare in mind, so the first question we ask is what family will best suit this child, rather than what are the adopters looking for," says Yu Chia-lin, a CWLF social worker. So far, the foundation has organized about a hundred successful adoptions.

"We encourage adoptive parents to tell the children they were adopted, because they have the right to know," Yu Chia-lin says, noting that most Taiwanese tend to be uncomfortable with this. They can be extremely possessive and usually go to great lengths to forge close links with their offspring, which may partially explain their reluctance to divulge information about the child's true origins. It also helps explain why they like to adopt babies with virtually no memories of past events.

Chinese people are still rather uncomfortable with the notion of adoption in general, possibly because of the social embarrassment associated with presumed infertility. Nevertheless, there are numerous cases each year. "It's far better for her to be adopted than stay in a nursery school, where she's unlikely to get enough attention," says a woman who asks to be identified only as "Mrs. Tseng," in reference to her two-year-old daughter. Mrs. Tseng adopted this little girl, who had been abandoned by her biological parents, with the help of the CWLF. "She has a congenital heart defect, and that's why I decided to take her," Mrs. Tseng explains. "Although I'd have been happy to know she'd been adopted by anyone who was able to care for her."

The 1993 amendment of the Children's Welfare Law, originally passed in 1973, represented the first attempt to provide youngsters with a solid measure of protection. "The amendment was particularly significant, in that it led to the drafting of the Domestic Violence Prevention Act and also spawned a number of policies designed to promote the welfare of the elderly," notes Lee Chao-jung of the CWLF. According to Children's Bureau division chief Tsai Pen-yuan, with one exception, all the existing laws regulating juvenile welfare will eventually be subsumed in the Children's Welfare Law, which now applies only to children under twelve, to provide a composite code governing the welfare of those under the age of eighteen. (The exception relates to protection of children from abuse, which will remain outside the code.)

The most recent development in this area was the setting up of the Children's Bureau, a central government agency that was launched in Taichung on International Children's Rights Day (November 20) 1999, two months after the devastating September 21 earthquake. "Even though the government was in the process of streamlining itself, it could still find the resources to set up this organization," notes Liu Pang-fu, the bureau's director-general. "That shows just how serious the government is about children's welfare."

The Children's Bureau's first task is to rebuild the lives of children who lost their parents or guardians in the earthquake. To help finance its work it solicits donations from the public and puts the money into trust. It also frames national policies concerning children's welfare, proposes revisions to relevant laws, and supervises the exercise of similar functions by local authorities. It liaises with other agencies, for example the Ministry of Education, which provides mentally retarded children with education tailored to their special needs, and the Council of Labor Affairs, which since 1997 has been holding annual qualifying examinations for babysitters, who must be over twenty and take a written and a practical test. (According to the Children's Bureau, as of this year there were about 15,800 licensed babysitters in Taiwan.)

In many areas, government agencies and nonprofit organizations cooperate with mutually beneficial results. For example, when a case of child sexual abuse comes to the notice of the Taipei County Government, its social workers have the power to remove the child from home without the parents' permission. The child would then probably be entrusted to the CCF's Taipei County branch, which would arrange fostering, professional counseling, and regular visits by social workers. Different local authorities have developed special working relationships with other organizations, such as the CWLF, that are well represented in their respective areas.

Responsibility for initiating appropriate legal proceedings against the abusers rests with the local government, which also pays a subsidy of about NT$14,000 (US$424) per child to the foster family--more if the case originates in Taipei City or Kaohsiung City.

Despite all these advances, many people still believe that not enough is being done. "Children's welfare has been ignored for too long, largely because young people can't speak up for themselves," says Kuo Jing-houng, chairman of Chinese Culture University's Department of Youth and Child Welfare. "People don't care about what's going on around them." As a result, Taiwan performs badly when it comes to nipping abuse in the bud, despite increased efforts to take care of children who have already suffered. "Why do cases of abuse occur over and over again?" Kuo asks. "Do social workers get involved early enough in the affairs of a family where a child's at risk, and try to educate the parents?"

Children's Bureau Director-General Liu Pang-fu also has doubts about this, pointing to what he describes as a widespread tendency to ignore the plight of children in general and the early signs of child abuse in particular. "We're not as nosy and proactive as Western people when it comes to reporting these cases," Kuo Jing-houng agrees. But even if there was more widespread concern about this issue, are there enough human resources available to take effective preventive measures?

Prior to 1999, when the Children's Bureau was established, child welfare islandwide was the responsibility of the Department of Social Affairs of the Ministry of the Interior, which had a staff of just seven. Even today, the bureau has only thirty-five employees and, according to Liu, a mere eighty-nine government child welfare specialists work in various local government Bureaus of Social Affairs. Approximately another five hundred are employed by private organizations such as the CCF and the CWLF. "At present," Liu says, "the most urgent task is to hire more specialists at grassroots level."

An even bigger gap between what is needed and what is available opens up between cities and rural areas. The Taipei City Government, responsible for 2.6 million citizens, has three times as many social workers as Taipei County, home to about 3.4 million people. "Taipei City has more money, so there they can afford to delve deeper into cases and provide better services," says the CCF's Yu Ching-mei. Taipei City is also richer in other professional resources. "For example, in Taipei County there aren't very many experienced child psychologists, and we often end up taking abused children to Taipei City for counseling."

There are also gaps in the legal framework. Cases of child abuse amounting to criminal offenses fall within the jurisdiction of the criminal courts, which have the power to double the sentence that would normally be handed down in cases where the victim was an adult. Less serious cases are handled by the civil courts. In some areas, judges take turns in trying "family" cases, while in others there are judges who specialize in them, but there are no judges who do nothing except hear abuse cases.

The Child Welfare Law does not define child abuse. Judges may refer to definitions of abuse contained in materials published abroad, for example by California's child welfare organizations, but apart from that there is no generally accepted standard. The Children's Bureau is working on an official set of guidelines, but in light of the difficulty of defining abuse, they will be illustrative rather than exhaustive.

There is little flexibility where remedies are concerned. In Taiwan a court can appoint a guardian for a child and substitute another guardian if the first turns out to be unsatisfactory, but it is not allowed to permanently deprive the parents of their rights against their will. (Adoption requires the consent of the natural parents or guardians.) Judges can also order errant mothers and fathers to attend a parental responsibility course for a minimum of four hours. Although offenders who do not show up can be fined between NT$1,200 and $6,000 (US$36 and $182), some still refuse to attend. "But if the court could permanently deprive the parents of their rights, they wouldn't dare stay away, because then they might lose their children forever," Tsai Pen-yuan says.

There are other factors that seem to make the case for entrusting judges with the power to transfer parental authority over whelming. For example, a small number of parents are beyond the help of counseling and therapy, and some children are forced to spend extremely long periods with foster parents, with all parties aware that one day the relationship must end. "Taiwan is still a place where 'parents' means only biological parents," Tsai notes. "So for now all we can do is try to put the child's original family back together again as quickly as possible."

But even if the law were to be changed, social workers would still have to confront another problem. "Taiwanese who are thinking of adopting want very young children who are cute, healthy, and smart," Tsai Pen-yuan says. Finding suitable adoptive parents for older children, especially those who can remember something of their lives up to that point, could prove an uphill task, whatever the law says. "Most abused children are above three, so would anybody want to adopt them?" he wonders.

Nobody doubts the seriousness of the issue, or the problems that loom unless more specialists can be recruited. "Children should be treasured not just by their parents, but by society as a whole," Tsai says. "Or what future does this country have?" Taiwanese need to learn this lesson and treat their children as unique individuals. Their future depends on it. In the coming decades, fewer and fewer active young people will be called on to support ever increasing numbers of senior citizens. Residents neglect these precious assets at their peril.