The assassination of Shinzo Abe by the son of a Unification Church devotee led Japan to a reckoning about the issue of child abuse and neglect linked to parents' religious affiliations.
In the wake of the former prime minister's murder in 2022, the government launched its first nationwide survey which found 37 of the 229 child guidance centers that provided answers, or 16.2 percent, addressed to suspected cases between April 2022 and September 2023.
The abuses included parents neglecting to provide medical care for their children or forcing beliefs and practices on them, according to the survey which covered "second-generation" followers, or family members of people who are actively involved in religious organizations.
Among 47 cases dealt with by the 37 centers, 19 victims were placed under temporary protection, the survey showed. Around half of the centers said they discovered the problems because the victims themselves sought help.
"Religious abuses tend not to surface unless victims come forward, so it is urgent to create an environment in which children are able to issue an SOS," said an official of the Children and Families Agency in charge of the survey.
Some parents were found to have forced their family members to engage in religious activities by using physical violence or by leveraging the threat of punishment in the afterlife, according to welfare ministry guidelines released in December 2022.
The survey did not tally which specific groups or religions were linked to violations of the guidelines.
The guidelines also noted that parents who fail to provide sufficient food for their children due to their resources being drained by donations to their religious group are guilty of neglect.
In July 2022, Tetsuya Yamagami shot and killed Abe during an election campaign speech. Yamagami's mother made massive donations to the Unification Church that proved to be financially ruinous for his family.
Yamagami was quoted by investigative sources as saying that he targeted Abe as the politician's grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, helped the Christian-adjacent organization that was established in South Korea by a staunch anti-communist in 1954 make inroads into Japan.
In a multiple-answer question seeking to identify the types of issues reported to the 37 facilities, the most common answer was "inciting anxiety by words or videos as well as ignoring or harassing." This was followed by cases involving the parents' "refusal of medical treatment recommended by doctors."
The survey also found at least 20 cases of medical neglect, including refusing blood transfusions, in a question that drew responses from 138 hospitals with emergency medical care centers.
There were also cases that led to death, as parents did not allow their children to receive treatment from medical facilities or, for example, refused a bone marrow transplant, according to the survey.
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