ed as a specialised sub-department of the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs at the beginning of the financial year on the 1st April 1948. This new office's principal activities included public assistance, child welfare, responsibility for the probation service, schemes for the further training of local social workers, liaison with all voluntary welfare organisations, and the development of long and short term welfare policies for the Colony.
Infant welfare activities were carried out mainly by the Medical Department and by the voluntary Society for the Protection of Children at their clinics and centres. Five orphanages also ac- cepted and cared for abandoned infants; these infants were nearly all girls, and all five orphanages were full to overflowing.
Child welfare, other than official and voluntary medical or educational work which is dealt with eleswhere in this Report, was mainly shared between the official Social Welfare Office and ten voluntary institutions most of which were subsidised by the Gov- ernment. Transfers of children from destitute or broken families, often for only a nominal consideration and by strangers who had only been in the Colony for a short period, continued to present a serious social problem, especially on account of the opportunities which thus multiplied for traffickers in children. Both in order to check these abuses, and in order to carry still further the fight against clandestine remnants of the illegal mui tsai system, all adopted daughters who have not been adopted under the order of a competent court are automatically the statutory wards of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs and have to be registered as such; thereafter they are periodically visited by child welfare workers until they contract an approved marriage or reach the age of 21. The voluntary registration of adopted boys was also actively encouraged, and any child who was known to be in potential phy- sical or moral danger was regularly visited by official welfare workers. By the end of 1948 there were altogether 1,133 children on this visiting list.
Youth work for non-delinquent boys and girls was carried out for two thousand destitute or near-destitute street arabs by over 20 Youth Clubs affiliated to the Boys and Girls Clubs Association, and in six welfare centres administered by the Social Welfare Officer. In addition the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides Associations made great and successful strides forward in their struggles to expand under extremely difficult financial conditions.
There were two great advances during the year in the facili- ties for dealing with delinquent and "difficult" children and young persons. The first was the opening of a Girls' Approved School, largely financed by the Government but under the management of the Salvation Army. The second was the appointment late in
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