handicapped juveniles. As an experiment the head of the Child Guidance Clinic of the University of Hong Kong visited the home once a month for six months in her spare time to interview selected 'difficult' cases. This did not amount to scientific research, but the reports showed that the Home is receiving some boys who will be very difficult to train, and others whose emotions are deeply disturbed.
47. Ma Tau Wai Girls' Home understandably caters for fewer num- bers than the Boys' Home, and serves an even larger combination of purposes. It is a place of detention for arrested girls awaiting appearance in Court, but during the year it was also decided to treat it as a 'place of refuge' for girls with behaviour problems though not necessarily guilty of criminal offences. It has to be borne in mind that delinquency may be a symptom of some more general trouble, and this is an experi- ment in providing treatment for young offenders as well as juveniles for whom neither prison nor probation nor any other legal form of correction is appropriate or adequate. The sexes are distinguished not only by the smaller proportion of women and girls taken in crime but also by the fact that troubles do not come singly to the female. In so many cases a moral problem sits four-square beside the delinquent one and cause and effect come to look like a chicken and an egg. Consequently although the two Homes have a common purpose of rehabilitation their methods differ. Although Ma Tau Wai Girls' Home provides comparable classroom teaching and informal activities, it has been found that among girls rather more reliance must be placed on individual casework than on group therapy, which nevertheless (as mentioned in paragraph 87 below in a comparable context) has a part to play in remedial treatment. The year has been remarkable not for the number of girls involved but for the variety of difficulties suffered before admission to the Home and revealed inside it.
VOLUNTARY WORK
48. Officers in the Probation Section, as in others, have continued to play an active part in helping the work of voluntary societies, mainly through acting as advisers or observers on their committees. As in all these departmental relationships, the closeness of contact and level of help and advice must vary from one to the other and from year to year. The Society of Boys' Centres gives a helping hand to about a hundred and forty poor boys between 8 and 16 years of age. Half of these actually live in at the Centre in Shing Tak Street. They are boys whose home conditions are such that they have difficulty in coping with life and are
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