projects also help to bridge the gap between town and country which is even nowadays such that when thousands of country lads have gone overseas to find employment, the villagers will still talk of their sons who work in the conurbations of Kowloon and Hong Kong as having 'gone abroad', and town dwellers and villagers are often ill at ease in each other's company.
29. Youth work is like many well-advertised commodities. It has an appeal for the young of all ages, from 8 to 80, and if it is best for the professional workers to be young, the volunteer helpers may be of any age. If 1966 did nothing else or gave us nothing else it at least brought youth to the fore in the disturbance which occurred in Kowloon in April and stressed the need for better and more diversified youth services. While the lessons of such disturbances and the potential growth of juvenile crimes are factors which give emphasis to shortages in the supply of facilities for young people, they do not provide the only or indeed the chief justification for providing them. Rather, it should be realized that young people constitute half of our population, that they are generally better fed, better educated and have a better physique than their parent's generation and that there is a great reser- voir of energy and power waiting to be harnessed for the progressive economic and social development of Hong Kong. Facilities which will enable young people to develop their physical, mental and emotional potential and to acquire a capacity for creative engagement and self discipline are a sound investment.
CHAPTER IV
PROBATION AND JUVENILE CORRECTION
30. Many people who ought to know better still regard a probation order as 'letting him off lightly'. Those who know will, however, realize that the work of what is at present inadequately known as the Probation Section is an indispensable ingredient of the treatment of crime, in which it is the full partner of the judiciary, the police force and the prisons. As social workers its officers, although concerned primarily with social inquiries into the lives of accused persons, with supervision of the convicted in their homes, hostels or institutions, and with some 'pre-delinquent' activities of juveniles, nevertheless find them- selves frequently on the twilight fringe between social welfare and the
16