ENG-1966 — Page 208

SOCIAL WELFARE

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only for short-term care, the object being the early return of children to their own families or their entry into new families through adoption. Residential homes for babies and children maintained by voluntary institutions provide 2,769 places for orphans or children whose parents cannot care for them. Voluntary agencies continue to offer sponsorship of school fees, cash grants, clothing, equipment and meals to needy children and some 65,000 are known to have benefited from such services in 1966.

WOMEN AND GIRLS

Work among women and girls in moral danger is continuous but rarely spectacular. Parents, and young people themselves, are encouraged to discuss the monetary and moral problems of sex with case workers of the women and girls section of the department as early as possible, so that girls may be guided back to a way of life which will in the end give them more satisfaction and happiness. An unmarried mother's most pressing need may be for accommoda- tion and medical attention, which the case worker is often able to arrange. In this way the girl's immediate anxiety is relieved and she is better able to act in a responsible way toward herself and her baby, and eventually to return to life in the community.____

The Sisters of the Good Shepherd maintain a modern home which provides for about 160 girls in need of training and preparation for a new life and a second home for teenage problem girls is in an advanced stage of planning. The Po Leung Kuk, which is one of the oldest of our truly local charitable organizations, also offers institutional care to women, girls and their children. In the depart- ment's two day training centres some 200 young women are given instruction in cooking, tailoring, knitting, embroidery, beading and laundering and taught how to use their leisure time. Engage- ments in socially more acceptable employment can generally be found for these women, although experience has shown that very rarely is it possible to rehabilitate the older and more hardened prostitute. The department has recently introduced a counselling service for husbands and wives with marital problems ranging from deep-rooted incompatibility to other more transient and superficial conflicts.