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TOKYO, March 9 (AFP) -& Yuri was unable to speak or walk and had the mental age of a baby when she arrived at her new foster home at the age of 12.

"She had been abused by her mother, grandmother and stepfather, and moved in and out of children's homes," said the Japanese girl's foster mother Kazue Oda.

But five years later, Yuri's life has been turned around. She goes to school, has made new friends and will hopefully be adopted by Oda, 46, and her husband.

She, however, is one of the lucky ones.

Thousands of young abused Japanese children spend their formative years being shuttled between institutions, their parents' homes and foster families, without receiving proper treatment to recover from the traumas they have suffered, experts say.

"Abused children suffer from a lot of emotional and behavioural problems, which staff at the institutes or welfare centres are not trained to treat," said Oda, who has worked with foster children for 10 years.

"They have started to understand this is a difficult issue. They know they have to improve the situation but nothing has been done yet," she said.

A surging number of abused infants have flooded child institutes or "shisetsu" nationwide since a law was introduced in 2000, enabling people for the first time to inform the authorities about suspected family violence.

"But there is no legal course to treat the child afterwards," said Motoaki Muto, headmaster of the Futaba Child Institute, on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Children with physical wounds and deep emotional scars are taken from their homes and herded into special institutions, where they typically live in crowded dormitories without receiving individual care, experts say.

Life at the institute is better than at home, but failure to provide trained experts who understand how to treat and cure victims of child abuse is creating an army of adolescents who are unable to fit into society and typically end up in violent gangs, working the streets as prostitutes or in jail.

"Child institutes do not care for the children sufficiently, there is often one staff member on rotation for six kids so there is no room for one-on-one care," said Toshihiko Hoshi, who worked at such a children's home for 28 years.

"The children are not taught how to love, they are also not shown how to study so they cannot do well at school and quit early," he said.

"After several years at an institute the children are ill-equipped for real life, yet they are forced out into society ... so it is unsurprising they turn to gangs and crime when they get older. It is a really sorry situation."

Children are legally allowed to stay in institutes between the ages of two and 18, but afterwards they must fend for themselves.

Some are even encouraged to leave at 15 if they opt against higher education as many institutes, full to bursting, struggle to make space for new victims.

The number of children in Japan's 550 children's homes has risen more than seven percent in the past three years to 30,456 in 2002, of which up to about 80 percent have suffered from abuse or neglect, experts say.

"Although the number of cases has risen, the number of institutions (to take them) has remained the same," said Tomiko Dai, a section chief at the Tokyo Child Guidance Centre.

"The institutes have expanded their capacity, but they are still filling up and it is becoming harder to enter. We have to beg them to accept children," she said.

With the economy wallowing in recession, the government does not have the money to build new shelters for Japan's neglected youth, so child welfare workers are turning to foster families. But they too are hard to find.

In Tokyo alone in 2001, around 3,000 children were in need of a foster family but there were only 308 registered foster parents, most recent figures show.

The need to free up beds at institutes has also resulted in children being sent home to their birth parents where they are again beaten before returning to the institutes.

Conversely, some abused children, who often have personality problems, are given to inexperienced foster families ill equipped to handle them. They also end up returning to the institutes.

Child carers are lobbying the government to revise the child welfare law to make institutes more homely by building smaller group houses and increasing staff levels. They also want money to teach care workers how to recognise, understand and treat the symptoms of abuse.

"The courts are studying whether the law should be revised, but there are voices who feel it is fine as it is. We are trying to convince them to change their mind but it is very difficult," said Muto from the Futaba institute.

Hoshi, who now runs a private home for teenage victims of abuse, doubts Japan's child welfare system will change any time soon.

"The people who know about the problem have to raise their voices and make others aware. The problem is that Japanese people are reluctant to kick up a fuss," he said. 

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