Social_Welfare_Annual_Report_1965-1966 — Page 36

agencies provide accommodation for varying periods for children found by the department to be in need of care and protection; the largest number, two hundred and seventeen children, entered the Po Leung Kuk, an old-established institution (see Appendix 13); the Kuk also now provides very welcome extra accommodation for disabled children and has started to run day nurseries. St Christopher's Home at Tai Po and the Children's Garden at Wu Kwai Sha also admitted a number of children referred by the department. Particulars of all known volun- tary institutions providing residential and day care are in Appendix 14. Of two thousand eight hundred and sixteen babies and children in residential care, only one hundred and twelve were available and considered suitable for adoption at the year's end; some are unlikely to be adopted on account of mental or physical disability or for other reasons, while the rest still have parents or one parent or relatives and will return home when the need for care ceases, so that there is little question of their being adopted.

50 Good progress has been made since the Chuk Yuen Children's Reception Centre opened. Children who are found abandoned or lost are made wards of the Director of Social Welfare by order of court, if their parents cannot be traced. Last year a total of two hundred and thirty-one children were admitted, of whom one hundred and twelve have already been returned to their parents or relatives; nine were adopted by families in Hong Kong; seventy-five have been transferred to other children's homes either for long-term care or pending adoption locally or oversea; and five died. Specialists from the Medical Depart- ment visited the Centre periodically to examine and assess those children who are either physically disabled or suspected to be mentally defective. In the nature of things, many of the waifs received into this centre are in a poor state of health, with discouraging prognoses.

51 Most of the workers in the Child Welfare Section are women, but there is a necessary place for male social workers too. Children are the readiest to smile in a community that is by nature free with laughter and reluctant to surrender to the depressing aspects of modern life; and the work of this part of the department can bring great satisfaction to many of those who serve in it. It is becoming as apparent here how- ever as in other sections that it is a distortion to treat children's problems taken as a whole as something distinct from the family unit. There is, or in most cases there should be, a family to provide a back- ground to each individual's difficulties and within which they may be solved.

24