ENG-1968 — Page 213

SOCIAL WELFARE

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children whose parents cannot care for them. An experimental foster care scheme, introduced towards the end of 1967 as part of the services provided by the International Social Service, made considerable headway. If the scheme should prove successful, its introduction on a permanent basis will provide a valuable new feature in child care service in Hong Kong.

Work among women and children in moral danger is continu- ous but rarely spectacular. Practical help and assistance through counselling 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 even- tually 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. A second home for 150 teenage problem girls, completed in April 1967, is planning for an extension. The Po Leung Kuk, one of the oldest of Hong Kong's charitable organizations, offers institutional care to women, girls and their children. The department maintains two day-training centres in which some 200 young women are given instruction in cooking, tailoring, knitting, embroidery, beading and laundering and are helped to use their leisure time profitably. Engagements 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 prostitutes. The Social Welfare Department also offers counselling service for husbands and wives with marital problems ranging from causes such as deep-rooted incompatibility to other more transient and superficial conflicts.

Hong Kong this year became the focal point of international interest in the work of rehabilitating the disabled. A seminar on mental health, sponsored by the World Federation for Mental Health and the Hong Kong Mental Health Association, was held in April and attended by participants from Hong Kong and from south-east Asian countries. This was followed by the opening in