Photo/Illutration The Chuo Ward child welfare center in Kobe (Kae Kawashima)

KOBE--A male staff counselor at a Kobe child welfare center who talked to a girl asking for help around 3:30 a.m. on a recent morning sent her away without asking her name or age.

 “She looked like high school student (on the intercom screen)," said the volunteer of a nonprofit organization who was staffing the night shift on Feb. 10. "I thought it was a joke.”

A city official said they will review the manual for staff counselors and how they are trained.

The Chuo Ward center also said it admonished the volunteer, who is in his 60s and has worked at the center for five years.

However, the Kobe city manual for counselors gives staffers leeway on dealing with visitors.

The manual states that they should report any nighttime visitor to a city official unless they can decide on their own whether the visitor should be allowed to enter the facility. 

In addition, the volunteer counselors needed to undergo just three hours of training by the center before they start working.

When the elementary school sixth-grader came to the center, the counselor told her to go to the police even though she said to him, “I was kicked out of my home,” via an intercom. He also did not report the visit to a city official.

The girl went to a koban police box, and the police officer contacted the same child welfare center, which finally admitted her.

The volunteer said he will refrain from answering early morning calls again at the center.

According to the Kobe’s Child and Family Policy Bureau, the center has delegated nighttime and holiday counseling work to the nonprofit organization Group Wa here since 2005.

The NPO is a volunteer group consisting of mainly elderly people who are more than 60 years old. About 1,400 seniors are registered with the group.

It also provides disaster recovery support and lifelong learning assistance for the elderly, and 32 members of the NPO volunteered to work at the center as counseling staff.

According to the health ministry, as of 2019, 49 of 70 local governments, such as prefectural and major city governments, which run child welfare centers, delegate a part of their operations to the private sector. The number has increased in recent years.

(This article was written by Kae Kawashima and Kumiko Nakatsuka.)

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