The good news is that last year, the number of crimes
committed by juveniles in Taiwan fell to its lowest level
in seven years. The bad news? Juvenile crimes are
getting more violent. How do the police cope with
the island's young criminals?
October 1997 witnessed one of the most shocking and brutal crimes in the island's collective memory. A dozen minors kidnapped a sixteen-year-old girl in Chutung, northern Taiwan, and held her captive, repeatedly raping, beating, and sexually abusing her over a five-day period until she died. The victim's body was riddled with wounds inflicted by a variety of instruments of torture made by the perpetrators, some inspired by porno graphic videos, others their own invention. But what really brought home to the public the full enormity of the crime was the televised reaction of one of the offenders when asked to comment on his involvement. "Is that so serious?" he asked blankly. Taiwan's criminal code prevents this boy from being further identified, but because he is classified as a juvenile it is at least certain that he was over 12 but less than 18 years of age.
The youth who helped torture a girl to death may have had difficulty comprehending the full enormity of this crime, but society as a whole had no such doubts. According to a 1997 survey conducted by the Ministry of Justice (MOJ), 66 percent of respondents thought that the problem of juvenile crime was "extremely serious." Nearly half of those polled were in favor of the death penalty for juvenile felons in all cases where adults would receive a capital sentence.
In an effort to combat juvenile crime, the eighty-three-strong Juvenile Police Branch (JPB) of the Taipei Municipal Police Headquarters is shifting its primary focus. "We still investigate juvenile crimes, of course," says Branch Chief Hsieh Feng-feng. "But for us, preventative measures are now more important." Hsieh notes that children are often ignorant of the consequences of their actions, so what really matters when it comes to handling juvenile delinquents is education, not punishment. It takes time to turn "difficult" kids around, which Hsieh believes is one reason why she was appointed Taiwan's first female police chief in charge of a juvenile branch. "Women give an impression of mildness," she says. "And kids need a lot of patience, so a woman is regarded as better qualified for this kind of work." She is perhaps being excessively modest--here her previous job was chief of the Taipei Women's Police Branch.
Her appointment is not the only sign that kids are treated differently from adults under Taiwan's criminal law. A special juvenile court is attached to every district court, and there are both detention houses for petty crimes and juvenile jails to house more serious offenders. Since the Law Governing Disposition of Juvenile Cases was amended last year, juveniles have been treated even more leniently. For example, a juvenile's police record must be destroyed if he does not reoffend for three years, and now the special rules for juveniles apply even though the offender attains his legal majority between committing the offense and standing trial, which formerly was not the case.
Hsieh approves of this lenient approach, saying that many teenage criminals are simply unaware that some of the things they do are against the law. If they are living in a violent environment, for example, they will never have a chance to learn that violence is not an acceptable way of life unless they are removed from that environment. "A child living in a violent family thinks it's quite normal to be beaten," she says.
Hsieh encourages her squad to devise ways of getting closer to children in order to educate them more effectively. For example, earlier this year the squad organized a two-day camp on Yangmingshan. Squad members led 170 junior high-school students in exercises designed to heighten their anti-drugs awareness and notions of gender equality, all in a healthy, open-air environment. "We have to fight juvenile crime at its roots," she says emphatically. "If a boy learns to respect the opposite sex, he'll think twice before sexually assaulting a girl."
Hsu Chun-ming, a detective assigned to Hsieh's branch, echoes his chief's insistence on the importance of education. "One of our duties is to go around high schools and talk to badly behaved students," he says. "We teach them about the law and other things. For example, we tell them the penalties for trafficking in drugs, but we also explain the harm that drugs do." While some people might regard Hsu as a tad naive about the effects of a lecture, he thinks that on the whole this aspect of his job has been a success, noting that some kids get really interested and start to ask questions. "Most of us unknowingly commit minor infractions of the law in daily life," he points out. "And children are notoriously ignorant about their rights and duties. That's why we have to visit schools and fill in the gaps for them." It is, he notes, at least a first step in the war against ignorance.
As an example of the kind of ignorance he means, Hsu points out that scuffles between minors sometimes result in fatalities because poorly educated or otherwise disadvantaged youths can simply fail to realize that certain parts of the body are particularly vulnerable to assault. "They just hit their victims on the head with stones as hard as possible," he says. "That can easily result in death."
Whenever Hsu visits a school he is careful to inquire whether teachers and students are being harassed or threatened by juvenile gangsters, most of whom are school dropouts. "A lot of delinquents feel their parents don't understand or love them," he says. "And their poor academic performance makes them feel frustrated at school. So they run away from home and play truant. Several of them get together, and suddenly you have yourself a gang." For this reason, the juvenile branch emphasizes the importance of schools reporting absentees to the police. "It's vital to maintain channels of communication between us and the schools," Hsu stresses. "We deal with the problems that schools fail to solve, and we can help supervise students when they're not in school."
Every day, all of Taipei's police stations must provide the juvenile branch with updated information about known juvenile delinquents and the places they frequent, such as KTV parlors, pool halls, pubs, and stores that rent out comic books. "They can get drugs in the pub," Hsu says, and that worries him, because according to MOJ statistics, in 1997 drug-related crimes accounted for nearly 18 percent of all offenses committed by minors, second only to larceny at 50 percent.
Besides carrying out routine daily patrols, the juvenile squad makes a special tour of places of ill repute between midnight and three in the morning. Some delinquents are savvy enough to avoid being caught in these sweeps, knowing that they happen at fixed times, but at least the regular police presence serves as a deterrent. "Children hanging out on the streets or at these places after midnight are would-be outlaws," Hsu says bluntly. "Some of them are students. They mindlessly tag along with total dropouts, and then they're just one step away from becoming criminals."
The ease with which youngsters can drift into crime is well illustrated by the story of Hu Peng-fei, and it is good to be able to report that this at least is a story with a happy ending. Hu, who is now 42, was once a cocaine addict, but now he counsels offenders at the Christian Born Anew Fellowship, whose members visit prison inmates to spread the Gospel. When Hu was 15, he ran away from home and dropped out of school, partly because he felt his parents were too strict with him, and communication between him and other members of his family was never good. "After I ran away from home, many of my friends did the same, in a show of solidarity," he recalls. "That really touched me. At that time, I thought friends were more important than parents. We just fooled around on the streets and sniffed glue."
On one occasion he was arrested for glue-sniffing and jailed for seven days. He remembers being afraid of the police. "A little bit of physical punishment was inevitable," he says. "They used to beat us kids on the palms of our hands and the soles of our feet." But the experience did nothing to reform him--he and his friends continued to intimidate and rob high-school students in the street, and would often help each other out financially.
When he was 17, he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to a period of "protective custody" on account of his age. (His adult accomplice received a fourteen-month jail term.) That did nothing to help his drug habit, and indeed he only quit the habit three years ago after being introduced to the fellowship by his elder brother. "I think drug-taking is the most serious of all juvenile problems, because so many other crimes are related to it," he says. "Once you take drugs, you lose your sense of reality. That's very dangerous. Sometimes a boy will rape a girl because he's on drugs and he just wants to act out his fantasies."
Detective Hsu, who formerly served at a precinct office in Taipei and has seen it all in his time, notes that adult criminals frequently operate alone, while juvenile delinquents increasingly hunt in packs. "Kids usually act together," he says. "If we see them out after midnight, we invariably ask them to show their ID, and we tell those under 18 to go home. For every kid who goes home, society rids itself of a potential juvenile delinquent." Those who act suspiciously or can't produce any ID are taken to the JPB's headquarters on downtown Taipei's Hsinyi Road, where Hsu or another detective will grill them and then phone their parents, who may not have seen their offspring for more than a month. Under questioning, these young suspects, who are often less smart than adults, sometimes give the squad leads to various crimes they or their friends have committed.
"Youngsters often claim to belong to some gang or other," JPB Chief Hsieh notes. "Saying that seems to give them confidence. But actually most of the so-called juvenile gangs are manipulated by adults, and they mean real trouble." She is aware of one case where a couple of adults maintained control of a group of about fifty kids by giving them handouts. On one occasion they vandalized a bar and the adults were caught. With the sources of money and organization out of the way the kids could no longer survive, and the gang disintegrated. "If we interrogate the kids with sensitivity, we can often get to the masterminds," she says.
Combating juvenile crime is never easy. Manpower is a serious problem--there are simply not enough officers available to follow up all the leads and inspect all the vice dens in greater Taipei. "It's impossible to establish a dedicated juvenile unit in each local police station around the island," says Lai Ching-yuan, who is responsible for juvenile affairs at the Crime Prevention Division of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, part of the National Police Administration. He notes ruefully that there are now so many calls for the establishment of special units to deal with particular social problems, such as women's safety and the investigation of drug-trafficking, that juvenile affairs tend to get lost in the babble.
At present, only Taipei and Kaohsiung cities have branches dedicated to juvenile delinquency, perhaps because this social problem is particularly prevalent in major cities. "Of course, we're short-handed," Hsieh says. "There are 260,000 juveniles in Taipei city, but this branch has just 83 members." She also stresses that her detectives must spend a lot of time visiting schools and communities.
Moreover, juvenile crimes are becoming more serious. Kids used to go in for petty pilfering, but nowadays they are more likely to steal a car. Where once they were content to break the speed limit on their motorcycles, now they slash pedestrians as they hurtle by. Then there is the human rights angle to consider: how to balance personal rights and freedoms against adequate law enforcement. In recent years, young people have increasingly taken the attitude that they can do anything they feel like doing, and Hu Peng-fei despairs of this contempt for authority. "When I was young, I wanted my freedom too," he says. "But what today's kids don't realize is that freedom comes only on condition that you don't hurt yourself or others."
Lai Ching-yuan thinks that the police are weighed down with duties but lack the power to enforce the law. "Some people say Taiwan's policemen are just a disadvantaged segment of society who happen to carry guns," he says, in a wry reference to the force's reluctance to use firearms against minors for fear of a lawsuit for violation of human rights. But at the same time he believes it is important to strike a balance between social order and the needs of children. "We have to find ways for them to let off steam," he says. "If we're going to prohibit speeding, we should consider providing a motorcycle-racing track." There, kids would be able to drive at any speed they liked, with the corollary that if they broke the speed limit on a public highway, the law would be enforced in all its rigor. To observers familiar with Taiwan's notoriously hit-and-miss approach to traffic violations, however, such a scheme may seem less attractive.
Human rights are becoming a hot topic in Taiwan, and Detective Hsu Chun-ming has noted a corresponding change in the attitude of juvenile delinquents when under interrogation. Formerly a detective could make these kids tell the truth just by speaking to them in a threatening way, or maybe roughing them up a little, but now an officer has to rely on cajolery. Hsu can live with that, however, "because today the police shouldn't just be content with investigating the facts of the case; they should spend some time finding out what makes the juvenile offender tick."
Nevertheless, undue emphasis on the rights of the suspect can lead to problems with an investigation. Hsu notes that even when criminals are caught red-handed they may not be detained by the police for more than sixteen hours without being referred to the prosecutors' office. A prosecutor can then order their detention for a further eight hours, but after that the case must be brought before a judge. That is not a lot of time in which to conduct an in-depth investigation of a case that may involve numerous witnesses. This is undoubtedly a serious dilemma for all police officers, including the JPB.
Increased freedom necessarily involves increased opportunities to go wrong. Minors can always find drugs and X-rated videos if they try hard enough. Maybe the police do not put enough effort into enforcing the law"--But there are so many outlets for these things," says Hu Peng-fei. "I don't think it's right to pass the buck to the police whenever a child goes bad. Society as a whole is to blame."
As, indeed, is the media, or so many observers believe. All the people interviewed for this article thought that the growing popularity and widespread availability of cable TV had exposed Taiwan children to an excessive amount of pornography and violence. And then there are the mushrooming porn websites on the Internet. "We do have a squad responsible for supervising the Net," Lai Ching-yuan says. "But there are so many pornographic websites, and some of them are based abroad."
Taiwan's media also has the unfortunate habit of giving criminals saturation coverage, with the result that some of them become unlikely folk heroes. After the arrest of Chen Chin-hsing, a brutal gangster and murderer, a Taipei city councilor did a survey of 1,000 junior high school students in the city. She claimed to have found that 13 percent of the children polled thought Chen was a "brave man," while 3 percent went so far as to call him "a good man." Many observers saw a direct connection between this staggering result and the impact of the mass media on impressionable teenagers.
Hsieh Ting-shan, dean of studies at a senior vocational school, is also an honorary probation officer for juvenile delinquents in protective custody. (Honorary probation officers, who work alongside salaried equivalents, are volunteers recommended by their employers as being suitable for the work.) He for one is prepared to cut Taiwan's hard-pushed police force some slack. "It's time businesses developed a little self-discipline," he says, noting that in most developed countries liquor and tobacco may not be sold to those under the age of 18. He cites one example of unofficial action in combating juvenile crimes--his own school has been conducting snap urine tests of students suspected of taking drugs. "This kind of test can be easily conducted by the school, and it's a pretty effective deterrent to students dabbling in drugs," he says.
Any far-reaching and effective campaign against juvenile crime is going to involve other organizations, apart from the police. The high-profile murder of the sixteen-year-old girl in Chutung fully reflects this fact--the county government for the victim's residence reported her to the Ministry of Education as missing in February 1997, but ministry officials failed to notify the police until six months later. (Not the least horrifying aspect of this story is that her parents also neglected to tell the police, because the victim had run away from home once before and they were reluctant to "bother" the police again.) If the ministry had taken prompt action, perhaps it would not have needed this girl's death to jolt former Minister of Education Wu Jin into announcing a series of measures designed to restore all dropouts to schools.
There are several other organizations with which the police can liaise in the fight against juvenile crime. For example, the Taipei Women's Rescue Foundation has been assisting the Criminal Investigation Bureau in forming a network to help rescue child prostitutes and refer them to occupational training centers for women. The foundation is also in the forefront of the fight against pornography, helping educate minors about its pitfalls and the relevant laws.
Of course, there are institutions with which the police have little contact but which nevertheless comprise an equally important force in society, the Christian Born Anew Fellowship that employs Hu Peng-fei being one example. The fellowship runs two homes for homeless children, "problem" kids, and juvenile delinquents. "At these halfway houses they're kept away from bad influences like gangsters, and they're treated with love," Hu says. "That way, they have a real chance to reform."
Hu would like to see the government help establish similar homes in every one of Taiwan's cities and counties. "It's little use punishing and threatening children if you really want to change them," he says. "The law and police efforts are important. But what children really need is love from parents, teachers, and society as a whole."