So, I was just browsing around the internet, and I came across this article on Mainichi:
A growing number of people are commissioning private detective agencies to investigate whether their children are being subjected to schoolyard bullying, industry sources have said.
Now, I’ve heard of overprotective parents, but this just seems a bit much. If I were being bullied, my parents would just tell me to suck it up and ignore them. Is it really that big of a problem in Japan?
Some companies are even offering on their Web sites to conduct detailed investigations into allegations that schoolchildren are being bullied at school.
Detectives tail children and sometimes plant small IC recorders on their satchels to record their conversations with classmates.
Now, I wonder if the children know that their parents are having this done. I would be quite upset if someone was recording everything I said, but no one told me about it. It would suck if you were telling your friend a secret and didn’t know it was being recorded
A major detective agency that has 180 branches across the country said the number of requests from customers to investigate allegations that their children are being bullied at school began to rise in fiscal 1998.
In fiscal 2005, the firm’s headquarters in Tokyo received 260 such requests, the third largest number following requests for investigations into suspected extramarital affairs and to search for family members who had run away from home.
The number of such requests further increased after a number of schoolchildren killed themselves in Hokkaido, Fukuoka and other areas this year after being bullied at school.
Read the full article here
Wow, Japan seems like such a peaceful country, but apparently bullying is so bad that parents have to hire a detective to stalk their kids around.
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