Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children's "Tong Le Ju" was revealed to have staff suspected of child abuse. The number reached 35, and at least 20 staff members were arrested. Chairman Xia Mu and Independent Review Committee Chairman Huang Jiachun held a meeting this Wednesday (26th). Press conference to explain the first phase of the investigation.
The investigation report pointed out that the incident involved various issues such as disciplinary behavior, complaint monitoring mechanism, manpower ratio and workload, and requested the meeting to replace all staff in an orderly manner.
Cai Su Shuxian, director general of the Society for the Protection of Children, and Cui Huiying, director of "Tong Le Ju", have resigned, and Xia Mu also apologized for the incident.
Child care agencies broke out child abuse incidents, shocking the society.
The review committee found a number of problems, including the fact that staff only wanted to control children for the shortest possible time, they did not take into account the dignity, emotions and feelings of children, and rude behaviour became a criminal offence if it went too far.
To make matters worse, this kind of behavior is routine in the hospital, where no one reports inappropriate behavior, and colleagues don't give each other advice, turning into a rough culture.
Management should know why it doesn't stop
The resignation of the Director-General and the Dean finally reflects the spirit of accountability, but the search for the truth cannot end there.
A key question is whether management knew about the scandal before it was revealed.
Huang Jiachun is still vague about this, not only that no one said that they had seen rude behavior during the investigation, and the CCTV footage could not see the management nearby, but at the same time, he also said that the management knew but did not stop it and would investigate them again. Is informed.
So does the so-called "knowing" mean that there has been widespread rumors of employee abuse in the meeting, but they do not seriously look for cases?
Xia Mu (left), chairman of the Executive Committee of the Society for the Protection of Children, bowed and apologized.
(Photo by Lu Yiming)
The faults of the meeting parties must be thoroughly investigated, and various reform measures must be implemented as soon as possible to avoid the recurrence of similar incidents of mistreatment of children.
Huang Jiachun pointed out that other departments will be dispatched to take care of the children of "Tongleju", additional staff will be recruited, and all the staff of the Children's Le Club will be gradually replaced to enhance professional support for employees and children.
In terms of supervision and management, the meeting parties should also reform the notification mechanism, establish a surprise inspection system, and balance the workload of employees.
SWD's oversight
However, although the object of the review report is the Children's Protection Association, which is responsible for operating the "Tongleju", the association has always been supervised and funded by the Social Welfare Department. Therefore, the SWD itself has to bear the responsibility for poor supervision.
One of the most obvious problems is manpower establishment. The review committee found that the workload of the relevant staff is heavy, resulting in frequent loss of manpower. 70% of the early childhood staff have been employed for less than three years, and the huge workload naturally weakened the effect of supervising the frontline.
After all, live-in work requires 24-hour shifts, and the industry is known to be difficult to recruit, and people with the same qualifications would rather be kindergarten teachers.
In addition, the SWD's insistence on using the lump-sum grant system is also the reason that affects the service quality of the organization.
Although the original intention of the system is to give organizations the freedom to allocate resources and thereby improve cost-effectiveness, human-centered services should not be too obsessed with cost-effectiveness.
Moreover, there is currently no staffing requirement for some professional positions in residential care homes. Therefore, under the Lump Sum Grant funding model, some institutions will ignore the staffing establishment beyond the basic requirements, resulting in professional staffing differences among residential care homes. For example, some institutions have permanent resident psychologists, while others, such as "Tongleju", visit twice a month.
In order to avoid such problems, the SWD should consider reviewing the expansion of the normative establishment of RCHE staff, and pay attention to the impact of manpower turnover.
Furthermore, even though the Child Protection Committee regularly submits reports to the SWD under the "Service Performance Monitoring System", the SWD has not been aware of child abuse problems in the past.
In addition to relying on document inspections, surprise inspections, and CCTV inspections, the Department must also try to directly contact employees and service users to verify the veracity of the content reported by the management based on their experiences and feelings.
When an abnormality occurs in an individual institution, the Department should take the initiative to intervene and understand the factors behind it, and work with the industry to improve it, rather than the current hindsight.
The abuser will be dismissed and arrested, and the management will also be held accountable, but if the system behind it is not changed, there is no guarantee that the newcomer will repeat the old tricks in the future.
Therefore, the most important thing is to rectify the management and supervision mechanisms of institutions and social welfare institutions, prevent people from developing abusive thoughts as soon as possible, and promptly expose and stop violations.
Furthermore, this kind of regulatory reform should not be limited to children's homes, but should also extend to other homes for the elderly and disabled.
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