The article goes on to cite that the overall number of child deaths have gone down by 35%, but the overall number of cases has gone up 22%. The fact that these cases are still in the low hundreds means that a sudden outbreak by one or two people can cause a huge swing in the percentage reports.

As for the child abuse, the largest number of cases comes from sexual assault -- 27 out of the 120 incidents. A quarter of the abuse cases happened to children aged one year or younger.

Police said that 718 child prostitution cases were reported during the period. The number of child victims in these cases totaled 651. Two of the children were elementary school students, 210 were junior high school students and 265 were high school students.

Many of the children, according to the article, were lured to the predators via BBS systems on the Internet -- a sign of just how pervasive Japan's use of the Internet has become. In my mind, this shows that it's not necessarily lolicon material that causes people to act like this -- they're already sexual deviants, and they're now taking greater advantage of what tools they have at their disposal.