Japanese mother and boyfriend arrested for binding eight-year-old daughter’s wrists to ‘discipline her’
- The couple, both 29, admitted to injuring the girl at their home in Fukuoka Prefecture
- The mother told authorities she did it to teach her daughter a lesson after she “wet the bed”
A Japanese woman, along with her boyfriend, was arrested on Thursday after admitting to injuring her young daughter by binding her wrists and forcing her to take a cold bath because she had “wet the bed”, police said.
Jun Yahiro, the boyfriend who lived at the same address, also allegedly hit the girl several times around midnight that day, said police.
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The mother, whose name was being withheld to protect the girl’s identity, told authorities: “I did it to discipline her because she had wet the bed.”
Investigators suspect the girl may have been subject to daily abuse.
The alleged abuse came to light after a teacher at the girl’s junior school in Chikushino city found bruises on her body on January 25.
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The school alerted a local child welfare centre, which lodged a police report and took the girl into protective custody the same day.
Mia Kurihara was found dead in the bathroom of her home in Chiba, near Tokyo, just over year after telling her school that her father, Yuichiro Kurihara, regularly beat and bullied her.
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Local authorities, including a child consultation centre, had been alerted multiple times about the abuse against Mia but they failed to prevent her death.
The prefectural government of Chiba said it would set up a third-party committee to review how the case was handled.
In March last year, the death of five-year-old Yua Funato in Tokyo gripped the nation’s attention as she had left desperate pleas for her parents to “forgive” her and stop mistreating her.
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Yua was starved to death by her mother and stepfather, in a case that prompted the government to introduce emergency measures, including increasing the number of case workers and granting child welfare officials powers to remove at-risk children from the care of their parents.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said earlier this month the government will soon confirm the safety of all children suspected of being abused, as the Chiba case highlighted a lack of communication among authorities.
