88% of kids in homes not foster care
Print Edition
ALMOST nine out of 10 children taken from their families in Japan end up in institutions rather than foster care, a rights group said yesterday, a rate that was the highest among developed nations.
Just 12 percent of children who have been taken from their natural parents are placed with foster families, leaving thousands of other youngsters to suffer in understaffed children’s homes, Human Rights Watch said.
That figure is the lowest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of rich nations, and is just a fraction of that in Australia, where 93.5 percent of these children live in a family home.
“It’s heartbreaking to see children crammed into institutions and deprived of the chance for life in a caring family setting,” said Kanae Doi, Japan director at Human Rights Watch.
“While other developed countries place most vulnerable children in family-based care, in Japan, a shocking 90 percent end up in institutions.”
In South Korea, 43.6 percent of kids end up in foster care. In the US, it is 77 percent and in UK it is 71.7 percent.
The 119-page report says 39,000 children in Japan have been removed from their families by the authorities, who determined their parents were either unable or unwilling to look after them.
The report, compiled over a three-year period, found Japan’s child guidance centers — the local administrative bodies charged with dealing with children in care — are “predisposed to institutionalizing children rather than placing them in foster care.”
“These centers often defer to the preference of biological parents to place the child in an institution rather than with a foster family, or seek to avoid time-consuming and often sensitive individual adoption or foster care arrangements.”
“In Japan, the interests of the parents are seen as more important than the interests of the child,” the report quoted one care worker.
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