Japanese Law - Tumblr Posts

https://www.loc.gov/law/help/child-protection-law/japan.php

Link for Child protection Law and Policy in Japan. But it completly covers what you said.

I went over the whole thing and spouse abuse in japanese law too in this post.

Hi I’ve only just caught up on the manga and the Todoroki situation, and I’m sort of confused. You see I’m not a victim of abuse or at all experienced the types of abuse, like I know Neglect is a form of abuse and I know physical abuse but not emotional abuse.

My main question is how was Touya emotionally abused? I know he was neglected but a lot of people say he was emotionally abused, and I don’t deny it but I just wanted to get a better understand on how he was emotionally abused?

Okay so TW: Abuse

Okay, so in order to really answer your question you gotta have a full grasp of the definition of emotional abuse. But before I give you the definition I have to put a disclaimer here:

I live in the United States. Every state has its own definition of abuse and its own Family Code that the laws follow. 

I also feel I must add this:

I investigate abuse and neglect for a living. It is literally my every. day. normal. life. to deal with this stuff. When I’m not on tumblr talking about fictional characters, I’m working with real human beings going through this stuff. And the definition I’m about to give you is straight from my work materials that I use to investigate and close cases of abuse and neglect.

ALSO very important: The US and Japan are entirely different and I have no earthly idea how they handle situations like this. I cannot speak from a perspective of a Japanese person. I’m using my own experience and knowledge gained here in the US. I’m applying our standards of abuse and neglect to the Todoroki family because, well, that’s all I know. I can’t apply Japan’s standards because I don’t know them. Don’t take what I say as saying “Japan should follow these standards” because I’m not. I’m just using what I know about the subject to apply to these fictional characters. 

Now that all the disclaimers are out of the way--

My state’s definition of emotional abuse is:

Emotional abuse is when one or more of the following has occurred:

> a child suffers mental or emotional injury that results in an observable and material impairment in the child’s growth, development, or psychological functioning

> a person or persons cause or permit a child to be in a situation in which the child suffers a mental or emotional injury that results in an observable and material impairment in the child’s growth, development, psychological functioning

Given this definition can you see how it’s considered emotional abuse now? The Todoroki family is not just a case of neglect. “Emotional neglect” isn’t even an allegation we investigate. There’s physical and medical neglect and neglectful supervision, sure, but if it’s emotional neglect then it’s pretty much just emotional abuse. 

The definition of emotional abuse is not reliant upon the ACT of the parent emotionally abusing their child, it’s reliant upon the result of the parents’ actions. Notice how in the definition is specifically says “results in an observable and material impairment”, meaning that because of the mental and emotional injury sustained by Toya, it is considered emotional abuse. 

Before I present my evidence to the court let me explain in detail why this ended up being abusive and not just neglectful.

Endeavor had children for the wrong reason. Before Toya was even born he was doomed. He was born into a relationship with his father that consisted of training nonstop, spending lots and lots of time together, getting nonstop attention from his dad. We don’t know how much time Rei spent with Toya, but based on their testy relationship, I’d say they never got to have a strong bond the way Rei did with Shouto. But regardless of Rei’s presence, Toya was BORN into this dynamic, and so his little kid brain immediately made the association of: training = father’s love and acceptance. 

So when you have that association in your brain (reminding you this is like a 4 or 5 year old brain), and suddenly your father STOPS training you, what does that tell you?

no more training = loss of father’s love

That’s what happened here, and that’s what Enji’s behavior told Toya. And for a kid, whose entire world consists of their parents and family, that’s pretty fucking devastating. Now for the actual evidence.

Evidence of emotional injury:

Toya was self harming

And showing observable signs of distress (note hair pulling/ripping), and the crying spells.

Endeavor failed to step in and remove his child from a harmful situation (i.e. spending time with him or something, literally anything) and it injured his child to the point that it was too late.

What makes this a situation of emotional abuse and not just neglect, is that there’s observable emotional injury. Oh and PHYSICAL injury. It even resulted in “death”. 

Emotional abuse does not just mean verbal assault, name calling, talking down to, etc. It’s also a lack of emotional support and care.

The unfortunate reality, at least here where I live, is that in real cases of emotional abuse it’s still very hard to prove and intervene on because no matter how hard you try you can only go off of what you’re told by the children and the family, and you can never get 100% of the full picture. It sucks. In the case of the Todoroki family, we as readers get to see the whole picture. So therefore I can easily say this is a situation of emotional abuse. 

After looking more into the way real life Japan deals with crime, I am coming back to the Dabi confession and of course Endeavor not facing legal consequences, considering HK has on multiple occasions brought up real life issues that are similar in bnha and Japan.

So Japan has a 99% conviction rate. This has to do with multiple factors, but one of the biggest is the fact that crime is only brought to a judge if there is an overwhelming amount of evidence. Because lawyers in Japan do not like losing, it can be incredibly career damaging. So a ton of crimes are actually solves outside of a courtroom, especially with minor crimes like theft due to compensation.

So one would assume that Dabi collected all this evidence of actually being Toya and making a public statement so he could get evidence on him that would actually lead to a trial, even going so far to get a DNA test done.

But then there is the fact that Japanese law has been heavily criticized for violating human rights due to what is in English called the “hostage justice”. So suspects are automatically found guilty, unlike most western law where it’s: innocent until found guilt, in Japan it is the opposite. And those suspects are treated with that in mind. So there were cases where the police faked evidence so they could pin it on someone but more importantly the Japanese crime system is based on confession.

What does that mean? That means most people are found guilty by confession the crime. With a 99% conviction rate that is huge. And it is that huge partially due to the hostage justice. Suspects can be detained up to 23 days, have no right to remain silent and are interrogated without a lawyer present. What does that lead to? It leads to false confessions.

Human rights organizations have pointed out multiple times that psychological torture is a common practice that leads to forced confessions. In western countries those are mostly outlawed, because it is known that a forced confession is based on the victim trying to get the torture to stop and not actual confession, so they will confess to everything. Something that was extremely common in the witch trials, where the “witches” were usually tortures until they confessed to being a witch, so they’d rather get executed than having to endure ongoing torture. On a side note, not important to bnha, but: they often pin crimes on immigrants or foreigners and refuse to give them translators.

This has come up extremely due to a case where the innocent suspect had an alibi but confessed to the crime anyway and got convicted for it because he confessed it during the interrogation.

So this leads us back to bnha, Dabi presented evidence, Endeavor confessed these crimes on an open panel and he is still not being legally prosecuted because of his status.

Now a lawyer in bnha obviously wouldn’t want to be the one that brings the top pro in front of a courtroom before the confession because he would have lost that case without a confession. So all of the evidence they could have gotten being statements from all of the children and medical staff or teachers that all should have legally within Japanese current law reported the child and spouse abuse could have been thrown out if Endeavor just wouldn’t have confessed.

And police would not arrest one of the most famous people in Japan, let alone someone they work with. And even if they did, it would have not been public (in Japan nearly all cases are non public) and they wouldn’t have forced him, seeing as he was on their side. They at best would have invited him for a nice cup of tea and asked if he did it, Endeavor would have said no and let go. Even a really passionate police officer that hates him would have not tried to torture a guy with this much money, influence, let alone a quirk like hellflame.

But now with Dabi’s evidence and Endeavor’s confession still nothing is happening, his status still protects him. So obviously Dabi’s hasn’t gone far enough if he played by the flawed legal system and still nothing is happening.