31. Infant welfare is the special concern of the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children with its six centres where babies up to 18 months old are given nutritious food and medical treatment and mothers taught how to look after their children properly. The Society also operates crêches in three of its centres, where under-nourished babies are nursed back to health.
32. The Protection of Women and Juveniles Ordinance passed in 1951 confers wide powers on the Director of Social Welfare in cases where there is reason to suspect exploitation or ill-treatment of boys under 16 or of girls under 21, including the power to assume legal guardianship over such children under certain conditions. In many other instances, children require some degree of care or supervision, usually because their parents are temporarily or permanently unable, unwilling or unfit to look after them properly. At the end of the year, there were 8,557 children of all these categories in the care of the Department (see Appendix 8).
33. The efforts of the Department in child care and protection are greatly aided by the work of the Police Force, especially of the Women Police, with whom closer collaboration was established during the year.
CHAPTER V
FAMILY WELFARE
34. With a population growing by over 100,000 annually from natural increase and by further thousands from immigration, family welfare needs have by no means been disposed of by the comparative prosperity of recent years.
35. Even if such prosperity continued, which is by no means certain, and employment were easier to find, the tasks of feeding extra mouths, clothing and educating young children, warding off illness and searching for a dwelling place will always be exacting for the poorer people of Hong Kong, despite the progress made in the fields of medicine and health, and the vast resettlement and housing programmes, at least until the advantages of, and indeed the necessity for, family planning are realized.
36. The Hong Kong Family Welfare Society, the object of which is to assist and support the family unit, continued to be one of the most effective of all agencies in helping needy families. Through the medium
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