By Eri Furukawa

While murder cases where adults kill children--including their own--stand out, murder cases involving juveniles have increased recently, and they have become more atrocious and complex. In the first half of this year, crimes have been committed by ordinary boys and girls considered well-behaved with good school records and no criminal histories. Are there any common factors among them that impelled them to kill?

Though these boys and girls committed crimes, they are usually called "good children." In fact, "good children" is perhaps the keyword to understand recent juvenile delinquency. They restrain their own will and suppress their frustration to satisfy many expectations of them. This seems to be one of the causes of these crimes.

There is the great difference between children who can control their emotions and those who cannot. Juveniles who don't know how to restrain their frustrations may do something absurd or commit a crime. Some may commit misdemeanors or serious crimes and some may be led to manslaughter. If parents are the objects of murder, the main cause is probably the child's repressed frustration.

On June 20 this year in Nara Prefecture, the house where a doctor and her family lived burned down. The woman and her two children were found dead. The father was not home at the time. The culprit in this murder case was their oldest son, who is the father's child by a former marriage. The boy said, "I was scolded about my grades by my father. I set fire to the house to kill my mother and my younger brother and sister. I knew they were sleeping on the second floor." However, afterwards, he was apologetic for his actions.

In more recent cases involving juveniles, they tend to explode at trifling matters and commit crimes, with the highest number of cases occurring in 2000. Many murder cases by seventeen-year-old boys and girls happened in that year, and experts then indicated that boys and girls who are egotistical have greatly increased. For that reason they apparently explode in anger when someone scolds them, and as a result they kill someone.

The murder case in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture in 2004 was also caused by this reason. The assailant was a girl (she is younger than the boy was in the 1997 Sakakibara murder case) and she was in the same class as her victim. This incident sent a huge shockwave throughout the nation. According to the assailant's statement, she wanted to murder the girl because she wrote scathing sentences on the message board of the assailant's homepage. The homepage was very important for her, and so she decided to kill the girl because of what she had done.

Because of the Sasebo incident, violent movies, books and video games received great attention by the media. Though the media reported about them at that time, they need to be observed more attentively in the future.

Modern society is flooded with information; moreover, cell phones and computers are prevalent. The nuclear family is considered to be the norm these days. However, the connection among neighbors is getting weak, and communication among family members has decreased. In consequence, parents don't know what their children are doing. Conversely, children don't recognize parental authority.

Perhaps communication problems are inevitable when a child enters puberty. However, pressure from parent's unrealistic expectations of their children's future, combined with the use of corporal punishment with children for discipline, is not effective. Even if a conflict of opinions between parents and their children occurs, it shouldn't develop into murder if the relationship between parents and children is basically good.

If children commit a crime they will suffer a lifetime of disgrace, especially if they commit murder. Their thoughtless action deprived someone of their future life. This has become a very big concern nationwide. Local governments, private enterprises, schools and neighborhoods should tackle this problem together, and they should see to it that these types of crimes never happen again.

The most important thing is for both adults and children to empathize with each other and restore Japan to a safe country.