On October 13, police in Hsinchu County's Chutung Precinct broke a shocking criminal case involving youths-thirteen teenagers, both male and female, had confined a 14-year old girl to a room, beaten her to death, and then buried her body. The viciousness of their crime and their lack of any remorse over what they had done-one even asked police handling the case "Is it that serious?"-has shocked the nation and given rise to a wave of discussion on what is wrong with today's youth.

On October 5th, the young victim, surnamed Chien, was apparently tricked by the leader of the group, a boy surnamed Hsu, into coming to his house where she was confined and tortured until her death on October 10th. The coroner's examination revealed that while she had been confined, Chien had had nothing to eat or drink, and had been beaten, burned and sexually abused. She died of head injuries. She had also had swear words carved into her flesh showing that her killers had done everything in their power to both torture and shame her. In the days after the case exploded on the public awareness, more stories of juvenile crimes including gang fights and thefts appeared in the newspapers, suddenly turning these youths on the edge into a focus of public concern.

The problem with Taiwan's youth has already become so serious that an adolescent commits a crime every 17:23 minutes. Chang Chung-huei, head of the Hsinchu City police's Youth Task Force, attributes the frequency of juvenile crime to peer pressure and the dissolution of responsibility. He feels that the influence of their peer group can easily push youths to commit crimes. According to statistics from Tainan's Kueijen Precinct, the most common adolescent crime is theft, followed by drug abuse and gambling. Gang fighting and incidents of violence are also known to occur. But cases such as that in Hsinchu involving such terrible abuse and murder were rarer in the past.

When people examine the problems of youth, in addition to the influence of peers, family and school are often cited as factors. Though the boy, Hsu, and his father lived in the same five-story building, his father usually lived and did his business on the first floor while the boy, who didn't get along with his father, lived on the fifth floor. As for Hsu's father, who claims to have had no idea what his son was doing under the same roof, investigator Wu Chia-chien has served him a summons asking him to come and explain. If he is found to have known what was going on, he will be considered an accessory. If he didn't know, he will be viewed as negligent under child-care laws and will be required to attend parenting classes.

On the educational side of the question, all of the kids involved had dropped out of school. For this reason, Minister of Education Wu Ching pointed out that to date, the educational system hasn't established smaller classes and smaller schools, nor has it stopped putting students into classes based on their abilities. He views this lack of action as one of the reasons for the problem. In an effort to fix the problem, the ministry intends to bring more than 4200 primary and middle-school drop-outs back to school. And within five months in the spring term, it plans to bring more than 10,000 middle-school graduates who are neither working nor studying back to school for "Tenth Grade Skills Education" to teach them practical skills.

In fact, the Ministry of Education (MOE) began putting forward proposals to strengthen guidance counseling for primary and middle-school students in 1991. Ironically, the girl who was killed had been pinpointed as a target for the special counseling system. And her 13 killers also should have received counseling in middle school. But some people have doubts about the MOE's ability to bring dropouts back to school and others are afraid of the effect these kids will have on other students.

Shih Ying, head of the Humanistic Education Foundation, thinks that the problem is not with bringing these students back to school, but with a system that still creates classes based on students' abilities. He feels that the educational system has already given up on these students and it is just too naive of that system to now try to solve their problems by bringing them back to school. Moreover, the ideal of smaller classes and schools has never been put into practice. This means that students who are ignored at home don't get their teachers' attention when they go to school.

According to research by Wu Ying-chang, director of the Taipei City Bureau of Education, when children first enter middle school, they still want to be "good students." But when they run into difficulties, they are gradually labeled "bad students" and the distance between the students and the educational system begins to grow. When teachers and parents also give up on them or they fall under the influence of a bad crowd, it is very likely that they will begin down the wrong path and become one of those "worthless" people which society has given up on.

The power of the media has also been brought up in this recent wave of discussion because many of the tortures used by the 13 kids involved in this murder were learned from violent Japanese videos. With many parents busy earning money, they have no time for their children, simply using the TV or a computer as a kind of electronic baby-sitter. This makes the problem of the media that much more serious.

Many reasons can be found to explain cases of juvenile crime, but all of these reasons point back to the children having been ignored or given up on. On October 15, a Buddhist organization announced that it was recruiting people to go to juvenile prisons to talk to kids. The organization hopes that some people will be able to give their time and attention to these kids on the edge and hopes to hasten the creation of youthful offender counseling system in which adults "adopt" a child whom they counsel. Also, at the beginning of October, revisions to laws on juvenile crime were passed which focus primarily on protecting kids rather than watching and punishing them. For example, it allows judges who feel sympathetic to a youth's situation to moderate a sentence and even reduce it to probation for kids between the ages of 12 and 18 who have committed a serious crime normally warranting a sentence of up to ten years. As says Weng Yu-jung, president of the High Court says, what is special about these revisions is that they don't give up on any child. Children misbehave, they aren't criminals. These are laws that have been revised with a loving heart.

These misbehaving youths are not the violent offenders who are destroying the social order. On one level, they are a mirror for our unfeeling society. Although the curfew on kids put into effect by the Taipei City Government reduced juvenile crime by 25% for the period from February to August compared to the same period last year, if we really want these misbehaving, lost children to find their way again, society must show them more care and love.

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Raves and motor-cycle racing. . . . the live fast attitude of youth? What do teenagers really need? Do adults have the answer? (photo by Hsueh Chi-Kuang)