The shock of a mother’s violent slap in the face… A girl suffering from her father’s excessive violence “Attended a prestigious school, but attempted suicide and had a daddy’s life” – a spectacular trajectory!
Nonfiction writer Kota Ishii delves into the reality of the "young homeless," the young people who have lost their homes!
The number of abuse consultations received by the Child Guidance Center is The number of cases of abuse reported to the Child Guidance Center has been increasing for more than 30 consecutive years. The number of cases of abuse reported to the Child Guidance Center has been increasing for more than 30 consecutive years, and has finally reached a record high of 200,000 cases. The number of cases has increased for more than 30 consecutive years, finally surpassing 200,000.
Finding and protecting a child who is being abused at home is called “temporary custody. Once a child is removed from the home and observed, he or she is placed in a foster home or with foster parents, as the case may be.
In this series, “Young Homeless,” we have often shed light on children who have lost their homes due to abuse. This time, we were contacted by a young girl who was temporarily sheltered three times in her junior and senior high school years, but ended up returning to her abusive parents’ home.
Why was she sent back to her abusive parents after being temporarily sheltered? We would like to consider this from the experience of a girl who continued to hurt herself through prostitution and suicide attempts because of this.
Yelling and raising her hands in anger at both her wife and daughter
The house was located in a quiet residential area in western Japan. The father was a researcher and the mother a housewife. The second of the four sisters was Mana Yamagishi (pseudonym).
Her father was an outwardly good-looking type of man, with a low profile and an affable attitude toward strangers and everyone else. However, when he returned home, his personality changed completely. He was always irritated, and if he didn’t like something, even a little, he would yell at his wife or daughter and raise his hands in anger.
To the family, the only reasons for his father’s anger were absurd. He would start a riot because he said the TV was too loud, or he would throw things at them because they didn’t like his language. Sometimes he would get violent when he didn’t like the sound of walking on the stairs. In short, he did whatever he felt like doing. This meant that his wife and daughters were always afraid of him and had to spend their time listening to their father’s face.
Mana describes the family relationship as follows.
My mother was quiet and obeyed my father. Even when he beat her for no reason, she kept quiet and did not resist. It was like she was mentally controlled by my father. My father once told me to be quiet because I (Mana) was noisy, and he even strangled me.
People around me must not have known that my father was violent. My mother never told my grandparents or even relatives about the domestic violence, and she never ran away from home. However, the stress seemed to have built up considerably, and my mother used to hit my oldest sister when my father was not around. Because of this, she would hit me, the second oldest, and I would hit my sisters.”
The father’s domestic violence was passed down the chain from the mother to the eldest sister, and from the eldest sister to her younger siblings. This also made the family relationship cold and suffocating.
The father was also unusually obsessed with his daughters’ education. All of his children were enrolled in cram schools from the time they could remember and were required to take the entrance exam for elementary school. They were also forced to take one lesson after another, and their week was filled almost entirely with cram school and lessons.
Mana says, “The lessons were cram school and English conversation.
She says, “I was forced to do all kinds of lessons, including cram school, English conversation, violin, swimming, and karate. They were especially strict about my studies, and if I didn’t get good grades, they would get very angry with me. I didn’t make my own decisions; my parents told me to do this or that, and I followed their orders. My parents also decided which schools I would take entrance exams to.
