November is Child Abuse Prevention Month, an annual government campaign to promote programs that protect children from violence. Most people will say that they know child abuse when they see it, but what characterizes almost all the recent child abuse incidents in the news is lack of intervention on the part of child welfare authorities even when they've been following a case for years.

Last month a 14-year-old boy named Masaki Hattori died in Nagoya, allegedly beaten to death by his mother's 37-year-old boyfriend. Masaki's case had been in the local child welfare consultation office files since 2008, when officials investigated reports that Masaki's mother was neglecting him. A year later, case workers took him out of his home for his own protection, but only temporarily.

Last June, the office received a note from Masaki's junior high school reporting that the boy had bruises on his face. Case workers visited his home and talked to the boyfriend, who admitted that he sometimes struck Masaki to discipline him. Because he expressed remorse, they thought the problem was solved.