owes them a great deal, yet they are the first to acknowledge that in times of crisis social workers in other fields and their colleagues in the voluntary welfare agencies will drop everything in order to back them up. Anyone may be proud to be associated with them.
CHAPTER VIII
MORAL WELFARE
81. The aim of the Women and Girls' Section of the Department is to rehabilitate young prostitutes, dance hostesses and bar girls, and to give care and advice to unmarried mothers, to girls who have been in moral danger or are in need of care and protection, and to those who have suffered sexual assault. Its officers are also responsible for marriage counselling when family disputes are referred to the Department, and they make inquiries into proposed marriages between young members of visiting or garrison forces and local girls, or into other intended marital unions when the Registrar of Marriages finds that there are matters of which he is in doubt and of which he must satisfy himself under the law.
82. Work in this section is none the easier for the fact 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 therefore calls for sensitive, sympathetic and skilled casework, which is very time- consuming, but quite indispensable if any really effective help is to be given.
83. The social and economic conditions that distinguish any large seaport as well as any predominantly urban population combine here 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 do 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 in- dustrial setting.
84. The Protection of Women and Juveniles Ordinance 1951, an enactment consolidating and amending various measures that went back
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