gone down a little; two international agencies, International Social Service and Catholic Relief Services, continued to act as sponsors in these cases. During the year a hundred and thirty-eight children left for adoption abroad, as against a hundred and eighty in the previous year. (see Appendix 16).
68. Under the Protection of Women and Juveniles Ordinance 1951, the registration with the Department of girls adopted under Chinese customary procedures is compulsory, whereas the registration of adopted boys is voluntary. Under the same Ordinance the Director of Social Welfare is empowered to assume guardianship of children in need of care and protection. At the end of the year rather more girls than boys were registered under the Ordinance than in the previous year (see Appendix 17). 69. The causes of juvenile mendicancy are numerous; they are fre- quently to be found in socially inadequate parents, broken homes, lack of attention in the house or of proper education, influence of bad associates, behaviour problems, financial difficulties or poor housing condition-in fact the whole gamut of the modern world's symptoms of social malaise. Officers of the Child Welfare Section pay home visits to study the family background and condition of young beggars and try to find out their real needs and help them to solve their difficulties in more civilized ways. The voluntary institutions mentioned in paragraph 48 are a valuable resource in this context.
70. Social awareness of the importance of family planning in Hong Kong has been spreading steadily as a result of the patient efforts of the Family Planning Association over nearly a dozen years. It is now operating fifty clinics, many of them in Medical and Health Department clinic premises, including fifteen Intra-Uterine Device Clinics which specialize in the IUD method of contraception, and much useful guidance has been given to some fifty-two thousand individuals during the past year. Social progress and economic advances are likely to be affected unless the population trends revealed by the census of 1961 are moderated. For this reason and still more from the social work point of view, in the interests of family well-being and cohesion, it is very important that parents be urged by every suitable means to take a responsible attitude towards the size of their families; no opportunity for spreading instruc- tion and enlightenment ought to be neglected. Towards the end of the year, the In-service Training Unit ran a special course for welfare workers from this Association.
71. The Child Welfare Section of the Department has continued to maintain close liaison with voluntary agencies many of which, as already
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