Social_Welfare_Annual_Report_1963-1964 — Page 32

of his legal wards, while a considered decision is made whether each young child should be adopted in Hong Kong or abroad or placed in a Home for a short or longer period of special care.

CHAPTER VII

MORAL WELFARE

62. The Women and Girls' Section of the Department endeavours to rehabilitate young prostitutes, dance hostesses and bar girls, and to give care and advice to unmarried mothers, girls who have been in moral danger or are in need of care and protection, and girls who have been the objects of sexual assault. Its officers also try to settle family disputes when these are referred to them, and they make enquiries into proposed marriages between young members of visiting or garrison forces and local girls, or into proposed marital unions when the Reg- istrar of Marriages wishes to satisfy himself on matters of which he is in doubt.

63. Work in this section is none the easier in that girls have to be willing to accept help if anything practical is to be done for them. This is particularly true of girls aged 18 and over who are not subject to any direction under the law. The section's responsibility calls for sensitive, sympathetic and skilled casework, which is very time-consuming, but quite essential if any really effective help is to be given.

64. The social and economic conditions that mark any large seaport and any predominantly urban population combine to make the task yet more difficult. Hong Kong does not escape the commercialization of sex, common to such cities, in the usual dreary forms of prostitution and pornography. Many women drift into the call-girl's life less because they like it than because it appears to offer disproportionately greater material reward for much smaller apparent sacrifice than the other occupations which are generally open to emancipated girls of limited education. Other factors influencing them are the crowded housing, separation from parents and the erosion of traditional close-knit Chinese family life which tends to occur in an industrial setting.

65. The Protection of Women and Juveniles Ordinance of 1951 con- tains extensive provisions intended to protect women and girls from exploitation and to prevent trafficking and the running of brothels; the enforcement of these provisions is primarily the task of the Police Force.

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