SOCIAL WELFARE
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Clubs, have opened or planned nurseries for day care; there is need for many more.
Where children are not being properly cared-for by their families, the Director of Social Welfare has a special responsibility for their protection under the Law and may make them his wards or apply to a Court to do so; 25 juveniles in need of care were the Director's wards at the end of the year. When the parents are temporarily incapable, through illness, unemployment, imprison- ment or dispute, the children may be placed in an institution for a time; if the parents decide that they cannot maintain a child for poverty or any other reason, and all efforts fail to dissuade them or to support the family and keep it intact, then the best course is adoption into another family. Girls adopted by Chinese custom thereby become wards of the Director; about 1,650 girls and 1,400 boys were on the register at the end of the year. Since 1956 it has been possible to apply for an Adoption Order by the Supreme Court under procedure similar to that in the United Kingdom; the practice is growing and there were 127 orders made in 1960 as against 97 in 1959. At the end of the year there were nearly 8,000 children in all, including those in institutions, whose welfare was the concern of the Department; many were being visited frequently in their Homes.
145 babies were found abandoned during the year, nearly all of them girls; sheer poverty was probably the chief cause, especially if the child was crippled and so likely to be a drag on the family. All these children were first admitted to one of the nineteen babies' or children's homes which voluntary bodies run, often with support from public funds. Several of these are financed entirely within Hong Kong and controlled by Buddhist foundations or by boards of prominent citizens; the largest of these, the Po Leung Kuk, has sheltered needy children for some eighty years, and now accommodates about 350; Christian missionary organizations run and staff other homes; all these institutions together care for over 2,500 children. There is a growing tendency to group the children in these homes under house parents with some approach to a family atmosphere.
Most of these children have very little prospect of being adopted in Hong Kong; and many remain in care until they are old enough to earn a living or marry. But increasing numbers of homeless or