modation and medical care. Counselling is given both before and after the birth of the child, to help the mother to plan wisely for her own future and the future of the child. She may be helped to legalize her union if this seems to be in the best interests of both the parents and the expected child, or to make arrangements with the putative father for maintenance or a financial settlement, or to seek care and adoption of the child by someone else.
54 Girls in moral danger still account, after dance hostesses, for the second largest number of those who are helped by this part of the department; services include guidance both to themselves and to their parents and help in finding suitable jobs. Vocational training is often necessary, to attract their interest, to keep them under close observation and to provide suitable skills for future employment. Girls who have been victims of sexual assault are interviewed to determine whether there have been any significant psychological or physical effects; if there have been, intensive counselling or referral for medical treatment may be required. They may also be helped, where it is necessary and possible, to change their environment, to train for employment or to enter an appropriate home or friendly institution. The staff concerned have been given special attention in recent departmental evaluation and development exercises, with emphasis on the study of the dynamisms of behaviour in the individual human being for theory as well as on the practical remedies afforded by vocational activities. Prevention in this field comes best at an early age in the shape of proper education, moral instruction and a loving but not unduly permissive upbringing; cure after early adolescence is a complex process and no worker how- ever skilled can guarantee to effect it.
55 The staff of the two Vocational Training Centres at Tung Tau and Chai Wan try to restore women and girls to self-respect and independence. These centres provide what may be called a semi- institutional setting, where nearly two hundred young women receive instruction in cooking, tailoring, knitting, embroidery and beading or laundering during a year; the numbers of those in the department's care who found work for themselves after training or who got employ- ment in factories, shops, offices or house-holds, or were married may be studied in Appendix 15. An experiment in group therapy is in practice at the centres, where groups of ten girls with behaviour problems are encouraged to discuss and thrash out these problems among themselves at weekly sessions. These meetings seem to be helpful to the participants.
26