In the case of Kai Kai (剴剴) — a one-year-old boy who died, allegedly from abuse by a Taipei nanny surnamed Liu (劉) — a Child Welfare League Foundation (兒福聯盟) social worker was handcuffed and detained by police for falsifying home visit records and failing to detect the abuse at an early stage.
Meanwhile, many are wondering why the Taipei City Government’s Department of Health did not include the boy in the government’s Specialized Doctor Child Care Program.
The handling of the case has caused panic among medical groups online, with doctors worried that they could also be held accountable for failing to detect child abuse cases in a timely manner. Some are planning to withdraw from the program.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare launched the Specialized Doctor Child Care Pilot Program in 2020. The ministry invited health bureaus throughout the nation to incorporate a “list of children under the age of three in high-risk and vulnerable families” provided by social care bureaus with their designated cases, and assigned them to specialized doctors who would regularly monitor the children’s health and development.
Why was Kai Kai not included in the program? Taipei City’s Health and Social Welfare departments should provide an explanation.
Had he been included, the abuse might have been detected at an early stage through home visits stipulated in the doctor care plan.
However, even if Kai Kai was included in the specialized doctor program, would the tragedy have been avoided?
It is doubtful, because apart from meeting with the children in clinics and making phone calls to encourage those looking after them to send them for vaccinations and regular health check-ups, the program only has home visits for high-risk children once or twice a year.
During such visits, doctors might not necessarily be able to detect child abuse unless the child’s health is extremely poor or they have new or old wounds that cannot be reasonably explained during a medical examination. Doctors are naturally obliged to report a suspected case of child abuse to health or social bureaus.
However, abused children are usually not taken to a hospital by abusive nannies or parents, so how can such cases be detected?
Instead of doctors, perhaps neighbors are more likely to notice whether a child is abused. Therefore, communities should be encouraged to report cases of child abuse to the police.
Otherwise, doctors might withdraw from the program if they are worried about being handcuffed someday, just like the Child Welfare League Foundation social worker — despite the fact that they were actually being investigated for forging home visit records.
Lin Yung-zen is president of the Taiwan Primary Care Association and a supervisor of the Taiwan Pediatric Association.
Translated by Eddy Chang
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS