UN Forced participation in religious activities to be classified as child abuse in Japan - The law stipulates four types of abuse: physical, sexual, neglect and psychological.

The law stipulates four types of abuse: physical, sexual, neglect and psychological.
PHOTO: REUTERS

TOKYO - New health ministry guidelines in Japan will classify as abuse any acts by members of religious groups who threaten or force their children to participate in religious activities, or that hinder a child’s career path based on religious doctrine.

According to unnamed sources cited by Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun, the Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry is preparing its first draft of guidelines to help local governments deal with issues of child abuse that have emerged in connection with religious groups such as the Unification Church, officially known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.

The controversial Unification Church came to attention in 2022 after former prime minister Shinzo Abe was fatally shot by a man with longstanding grudges against the religious group.

Children of religious groups’ followers have criticised the authorities’ handling of this issue in the past.

They have said child consultation centres and the police did not respond to their complaints of abuse, telling the children there was nothing they could do because freedom of religion is protected under the Constitution.

In October, the ministry told local governments not to make perfunctory responses simply because a problem is religious in nature. It is also working to outline specific points in the guidelines that the authorities should be aware of when dealing with such cases.

According to the sources, the envisaged guidelines will be in a question-and-answer format and will specify what faith-based acts against children fall under the categories of abuse as stipulated in the Child Abuse Prevention Law.

The law stipulates four types of abuse: physical, sexual, neglect and psychological.

Inciting fear by telling children they will go to hell if they do not participate in religious activities, or preventing them from making decisions about their career path, is regarded as psychological abuse and neglect in the guidelines.

Other acts that will constitute neglect include not having the financial resources to provide adequate food or housing for children as a result of making large donations, or blocking their interaction with friends due to a difference in religious beliefs and thereby undermining their social skills.

When taking action, the guidelines will urge child consultation centres and local governments to pay particular attention to the possibility that children may be unable to recognise the damage caused by abuse after being influenced by doctrine-based thinking and values.

In addition, there are concerns that giving advice to parents may cause the abuse to escalate and bring increased pressure from religious groups on the families. In the light of this, the guidelines will call for making the safety of children the top priority and taking them into temporary protective care without hesitation.

For children 18 years of age or older and not eligible for protection by child consultation centres, local governments should instead refer them to legal support centres, welfare offices and other consultation facilities.

Guidelines already exist for child consultation centres on how to respond to abuse, but this will be the first time that they are devised specifically for children of religious followers.

The ministry has been developing these guidelines based on interviews conducted with some of the children in question. THE JAPAN NEWS/ASIA NEWS NETWORK

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[AnsemSoD1]

So for the next fifty years, how do we see Christianity in Asia?

 

[cleanerfromvenus]

"Hinduism" doesn't refer to the same kind of thing as the -isms attached to the Abrahamic religions. It's a term applied by Western academics to all the religious practices of the subcontinent that aren't yelling NOT IT. So if you're doing something religious, and you're not a Sikh or a Muslim or a Jain or a Buddhist or a Christian or a Parsi or a Jew, you're a Hindu, whether you're worshipping rats, dressing up little girls like goddesses, wandering around naked with some stripes painted on your forehead, or writing Gitanjali, you're all Hindus.

yeah essentially pajeet paganism

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

It's ironic just how much of the backwards propaganda surrounding the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages through the Renaissance (Spread by Protestants and Atheists mind you), was absolutely FALSE.

…are you assuming those missionaries were all Catholic or something? Because that’s hardly the case…

 

[DiabeticSydePhil]

Like others said this is most likely a response to all the batshit pyramid scheme cults in Japan than anything.

For whatever weirdo reason the japs love cults.

 

[mold]

I heard a professor once describe it as being more accurately thought of as “Hinduisms.”

It’s basically just paganism that gets some special snowflake name for itself as the reward for somehow surviving.

that's an imposition by the Western academy so the dewey decimal system etc works basically

and don't get it twisted there's plenty of extremely intellectual stuff going on within the category "Hinduism" but imo one of the basic differences between what Westerners think of as a "religion" has to do with education and the profession of faith - we expect that a member of a religion will be able to tell you, because he has been taught to, "I am a member of x religion and that means y" and y will contain some statements about the existence of God and the relations between God and creatures. So by this metric Islam is clearly a religion because every Muslim can recite the shahada even if they can't understand it. But humans engage in religious practice without any kind of shared explicit ontological statements about reality all the time. I have deepthoughts about how this bias in Western scholarship causes us to fail to see how religious practice manifests in our own culture, like environmentalism and AA and antiracism, and this is not off topic actually because seeing how a nonWestern society like Japan deals with religious matters makes this really clear.