Japan gets slack on sex offenders

By Ryann Connell
January 24, 2005

Japan has finally started to question the way it handles sex criminals, but has been startled to discover that it lags well behind the rest of the industrialized world, according to Spa!.

A pedophile with multiple guilty convictions for sex crimes shocked Japan out of its ignorance earlier this month after he was arrested for the savage murder of a 7-year-old girl in a rustic part of Nara Prefecture.

His arrest has sparked outcry and an outpour of demands for such steps as the establishment of a list of sex offenders such as those used in Britain and parts of the United States.

But Japan's crimebusters are finding that the base currently being used to launch the fight against sex criminals is a very thin one.

"Unfortunately, there are no concrete measures on board to fight sex crimes and the matter hasn't even been discussed at the panel level (which is usually the first step toward formulating new laws)," Tetsuya Fujimoto, a Chuo University law faculty professor and crime-fighting expert, tells Spa! "In a very small number of prisons, they have what is called 'guidance for sexual problems.' These are sessions held somewhere from once every two weeks to once every three months or so. Sex offenders taking part in the program read a handbook, then confess their crimes to a group of other prisoners and promise to never repeat them. The sessions are like clubs that operate during free time periods and participation is only ever voluntary. A prison guard who is not an expert in the field oversees the sessions, so calling them counseling or group therapy is going way too far.

"Mind you, the number of sex offenders is nowhere near the number of prisoners jailed for drug offenses or involvement in organized crime, so the urgency to deal with them is not as strong. Don't forget, in 2003, there was about the same number of sex crimes in all of Japan with its population of 126 million as there were in New York City with a population of 8 million. In Japan, there is still not as strong a need to tackle sex crime as there may be in other countries."

Though that may well be the case, Fujimoto concedes that the sheer lack of attention Japanese crimebusters have paid to combating sex crime is alarming.

"There are already 41 countries throughout the world that have set up DNA databases of sex offenders. Japanese police don't even have up to date statistics on the number of sex criminals in the country," Fujimoto points out. "The National Police Agency should instruct prefectural police forces to work together to create a database containing the personal details of every sex offender in the country and make the database accessible to any crime-fighting force."

Some are worried that registering offenders could infringe on their human rights. But supporters of vigilance against sex offenders argue that it's important to act now while awareness of the issue is at a peak following the Nara killing. They point out that police already have the power to disclose information to crime victims and make public lists of parolees and say a sex offenders list would be a mere extension of these.

"Any countermeasure more concrete than a database should probably first require considerable discussion between the police and the legal and medical communities," Fujimoto tells Spa! "Perhaps they can come up with some special means that would allow crime-fighters to take advantage of the limited space available in Japan."

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