NCJ Number
93509
Journal
Victimology Volume: 8 Issue: 3-4 Dated: (1983) Pages: 173-194
Date Published
1983
Length
22 pages
Annotation
Filial violence is an emerging problem in the Japanese family today, although it was quite alien to Japan in prewar times. It is a product of the maladjustment of youth to diverse social and cultural norms in a rapidly changing Japanese society.
Abstract
Two recent studies on filial violence in Japan (one by the Youth Development Headquarters (1980) on 1,057 abusive adolescents, and the other by the Japanese Police Agency (1981) on 1,025 battering youths) reveal that these abusive adolescents are to be found most frequently (80%) among males of the age of 15 or 16 years. The problem permeates Japanese society. The primary victims are most frequently the mothers of the offenders. Socioeconomic backgrounds of the parents tend to be quite high, and the violent youths frequently attend good public or private schools. The peer relationships of the violent adolescents are poor and they tend to lack social experience. The typical family dynamics of filial violence are characterized as dominance by the mother and the psychological detachment of the father. At the same time, the mother's overindulgence and overprotection make it difficult for the abusive youth to attain emotional independence; these maternal attitudes tend to turn them into 'lions at home and mice abroad.' The nature of filial violence is too complicated to permit identification of a single cause of the problem. However, the malfunctioning of the adolescent-parent separation process, which might result from the interplay between the intra-individual characteristics and social structural elements operating in the home with reference to Japanese culture, seems to have a crucial impact on the emergence of filial violence. The understanding of filial violence can best be accomplished through a macroscopic view of Japanese culture and society today. (Author abstract)