Social_Welfare_Annual_Report_1963-1964 — Page 19

CHAPTER IV

PROBATION AND JUVENILE CORRECTION

30. Lord Beaconsfield's bon mot about lies and damned lies was brought up to date by Mr Lionel STRACHEY when he defined statistics as mendacious truths. It would have been at one and the same time satisfying to the Department and gratifying to the reader had this chaper opened with a penetrating survey of the trends in juvenile delinquency in Hong Kong. There are few topics about which so much is spoken or written, particularly in the journals of thought or through the media of mass communication; and few about which indisputable facts are so scarce. The truth is that we do not know for certain why some people become delinquent, what (if anything) prevents others from becoming delinquent, what will ensure that a delinquent will never succumb again, what may be the best treatment for the persistent offender, how many delinquents remain undetected, what the economic cost is of delinquency. Certainly there is no lack of shrewd conviction or intelligent belief about the answers to these questions, least of all among the social workers in the Depart- ment, but they are the first to admit that these are no substitutes for scientific analysis and logical deduction. This is however merely one facet of a much larger problem that confronts the Social Welfare Department as a whole, the lack of dispassionate and thorough-going research con- ducted in sufficient depth to ferret out the facts on social questions. Resources to undertake such investigations are not lacking but the time cannot be spared from urgent everyday attention to grinding routine and the needs of the individual human beings who look to the social worker for help. Meanwhile the sensational headlines will continue to appear, usually after a hasty reading of the quarterly figures which show the business transacted by the courts and the police; but superficial inter- pretation of such figures alone can never produce reliable facts.

31. What follows is therefore a sober description of how the factual situations presented by the existence of delinquency are tackled by those social welfare officers whose responsibilities are to look after such delin- quents as the courts refer to them. The methods used are probation, institutional care and aftercare, and the voluntary field affords facilities which are ancillary to both the preventive work and the aftercare. The staff shares the same functions and professional attitudes, recruitment and training, as all other social workers.

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