Jan 10

Today I met with my friend, who is studying at International Christian University as a senior. She finally decided to major in Anthropology, but she was also interested in advocation for children. She has worked on Save the Children Japan and advocated for educating the treatment of children’s rights.

We talked about many things, especially those related to our future careers. Because she is a senior, she has been working on job applications while I have just finished my first semester as a college student. But one thing we have in common: the undescribable anxiety for our future. Thus we spent a lot of time on this topic.

Anyway, about spiritual abuse. She seemed to focus more on supporting while the child is in the family and after the child leaves their family. Since I have experienced living in a group home, she talked about the quality of a group home.

My group home is awesome – of course, I am biased. But I heard very bad rumors from other group homes and rarely saw news articles reporting abuse in the group home, which should be a safe place for children.

And she said, “I guess some welfare workers treat children badly because they think of themselves as ‘who are helping the misery child’ to some extent.” I agree with that. However, I do not know how to prevent that kind of person from getting a position in the group home. In Japan, almost any kind of welfare institution is always recruiting workers despite not having enough money to run the group home easily.

My group home, though, have a lot of money and has some lawyers working for children. The founder of the corporation which runs my group home seems very good at finding and gathering the people they need. But not every corporation is like that. Some institutions are suffering from a lack of money. Others are doing everything they can to hire. We concluded we should consider these problems while discussing treating spiritually abused children.