It is a sad commentary on today's adults that the physical and psychological abuse of children is a growing and increasingly troubling phenomenon in Japan more than half a year after the Diet enacted a law prohibiting chronically abusive parents from meeting or corresponding with offspring they have victimized. Early this month, the Health and Welfare Ministry indicated that the number of child abuse cases reported to counseling centers in fiscal 1999 rose to 11,631, an increase of 70 percent from the previous year. The ministry noted a particular rise in cases of infants being abused.

Ministry officials are right that part of the reason for the apparent increase lies in greater public awareness of the problem and of a willingness to report suspected abuse. Perhaps that also accounts for the fact that the number of children dying due to physical abuse in the home despite the intervention of child welfare authorities fell to five last year, down from eight in fiscal 1998 and 15 in fiscal 1999. That any deaths at all occurred despite official efforts to prevent them is deeply troubling, however. The number of reported cases of abuse has grown 10-fold since 1990, and the number in which welfare officials temporarily separated children from abusive parents reached 4,319 in fiscal 1999, more than double the total in fiscal 1998.

One aspect of the problem of child abuse that is only beginning to receive sufficient attention is the fact that parents are by no means the only abusers. Japan finally is confronting the reality that some caregivers and teachers, men and women in positions of particular responsibility for the welfare of children, are guilty of violating the trust placed in them by their young charges, the youngsters' parents and by society in general.