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SOCIAL WELFARE

continued during the year. It will be financed partly by a generous private donation and partly from a Lotteries Fund grant. Sub- stantial assistance is to be given by UNICEF which already gives valuable support to child care programmes in Hong Kong.

A children's reception centre, run by the department, cares for children who are found abandoned or wandering. Their physical and psychological needs are investigated and their behaviour and growth observed and recorded, as background to a plan for each child's future. Of 176 children who left the centre during the year, 27 were adopted into families, 11 in Hong Kong and 16 overseas. The steady fall of recent years in the number of babies abandoned seems to be levelling out. The number for 1967 was 38 compared with 48 last year and 56 in 1965. Altogether 1,240 adoptions have been registered in the Adopted Children's Register since the first entry was made on July 22, 1957. Where possible, children are kept in institutions only for short-term care, in the hope of the early return of children to their own families or their adoption by new ones. Residential homes for babies and children, maintained by voluntary institutions, provide 3,117 places for orphans or children whose parents cannot care for them. An experimental foster care scheme was introduced towards the end of 1967 as part of the services provided by the International Social Service. If this proves successful, its introduction on a permanent basis will provide a valuable new feature in child care service in Hong Kong.

WOMEN AND GIRLS

Work among women and girls in moral danger is continuous but rarely spectacular. Practical help and assistance through coun- selling and guidance, both to the girl and to her family, aims to restore stability and create understanding. An unmarried mother's most pressing need may be for accommodation and medical atten- tion, which the caseworker 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 towards 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 prepara- tion for a new life, and a second home for 150 teenage problem

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