Earlier this week, I took a look at the tragic case of a 9yo girl who whored herself out over the internet. The circumstances that enabled her to do this were simple;
a. her mother worked for over 12 hours most days and
b. she had completely unrestricted and unsupervised access to the internet.
Subsequently I don’t blame the girl in situations like this, but rather squarely on the mother. Shitty parenting equals shitty kids, and if at 9 years of age she’s already whored herself out online… well, you can imagine the type of life she’s set herself up for.
In an attempt to curb minor’s access to the internet during the summer vacation period, deputy mayor of Taipei City, Hou You-yi (侯友宜), led a charge into several unlicensed internet cafes to shut them down.
You see contrary to the obvious, it’s not shitty parenting causing Taiwan’s kids to rampage on the internet, but rather it’s those evil internet cafes.
For some unknown reason, despite there being an acknowledged 157 unlicensed internet cafes in Taipei County, only 4 of them were shut down in the raids.
Why?
Cafe Free Space (自由空間) was not only caught admitting underage teens 18 times, but also permitted a 6-year-old child in the shop.
Hou said 70 of the 157 unlicensed Internet cafes have gone out of business. Another 55 that illegally admitted underage teenagers were immediately ordered to shut down.
So what are kids as young as 6 doing spending their vacation in internet cafes anyway?
The child, said the Juvenile Affairs Division, was accompanied by his 12-year-old brother.
The elder brother brought his sibling to the cafe because their parents locked their computer and were out at work.
And what kind of moronic parents leave a 6 year old in the care of a 12 year old all day anyway?
But, as always seems to be the case in Taiwan, the parents are no reprimanded in anyway. Rather it’s all the internet cafes fault.
If left unchecked, fast forward a couple of years and here’s where shitty parenting takes us;
A group of suspected Internet fraudsters barely of adult age was apprehended on Tuesday for allegedly scamming as much as NT$70 million (US$2.4 million) in just two years.
New Taipei City Criminal Investigation Division deputy chief Lin Chia-lun (林家倫) said the group was led by Su Ching-pei (蘇慶霈), who ran a betel nut stand.
Su worked through proxy agents Chen Yung-lin (陳詠霖), Chang Kai-fung (張楷峰), Lin Yuan-chuan (林元泉), all 21 years old, and a teenager surnamed Pan (潘), who recruited other young people between the ages of 15 and 20 at cybercafes and pool halls.
Most likely the end result of shitty parenting themselves, these criminal masterminds made their fortune by using
names that were suggestively female such as “LOVE,” “BABY” and “RUBY” in the game We Dancing Online (唯舞獨尊), to randomly chat online with otaku — a Japanese term referring to people with obsessive interests — feigning to be their female colleagues or peers.
The scammers pretended to promote software to increase the gaming points for the other player to gain personal information, which they then used to buy small amounts of IWAN game points.
The scammers used the points to buy virtual treasure from the online shop in Forsaken World (神魔Online) and Demigod (暗黑世界Online) to sell to other players of those games for profit.
Police said that although the fraudsters used the oldest trick in the book by asking victims to guess who they were, they got away with the scam because they knew the otakus’ weak points.
Kind of poetic don’t you think?
Now obviously not every neglected Taiwanese kid is going to wind up a criminal mastermind or whoring themselves out over the internet but without proper supervision (hell, any supervision) the temptation is certainly there.
Will the Taiwanese government do anything about it though? Not likely. They could introduce the concept of industrial relations into Taiwan and perhaps just flat out tell employers they can’t work their employees to death – but it’s far easier to blame a few rogue internet cafes and call it a day.
Problem solved… except not really.
At the other end of the spectrum here’s what happens when you push your kid too hard to excel when he’s clearly not interested;
A high school student believed to be mentally ill injured his parents with a knife during an alleged attempt to kill them in Kaohsiung yesterday.
His mother sustained serious stab wounds to her back and head in the attack at their home, and remains in a coma after being rushed to the hospital.
The 16-year-old student, surnamed Chang, who is from a top-three senior high school of the southern city, was said to have worked out a detailed plan to kill his parents.
His teachers were cited by the United Evening News as describing the student as a quiet teenager whom had shown no signs of violence at school, though he often skipped classes and was late to school.
Not surprisingly, the parents saw this coming and took their son to a psychiatrist;
‘Help help, our son doesn’t want to do good at school. What’s wrong with him?!’
Despite having a photocopy of the murder plan as carried out by their son though, neither father nor mother were prepared for the plan itself to eventuate.
Following the attack, the father showed police a photocopy he had kept of the alleged plan that the son had written down in a notebook, the United Evening New said.
The father told police he and his wife had taken their son to a psychiatrist this summer after he showed abnormal behavior.
It is uncertain what kind of mental disease he is suffering from.
I wonder if there’ll every be a day a large chunk of Taiwanese parents realise their kids aren’t inconvenient subordinates who want nothing more than to be ordered around all the time.
Overbearing or completely indifferent, I thank my lucky stars I didn’t grow up here.