At the end of last year, it was revealed that at least 34 employees of "Tong Le Ju", a residential institution for young children under the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children, were suspected of abusing 40 children.
The Society for the Protection of Children established an independent review committee earlier and submitted the "Interim Review Report", which shows that Tong Le Ju has extremely absurd management flaws from top to bottom, but has not touched on the responsibility of the Social Welfare Department.
The research team of the Legislative Council Election Committee Member Lee Ho-yin's Office conducted a study and found seven major deficiencies in the SWD's oversight work, including failure to effectively follow up on complaint cases, failure to keep statistics on staff turnover, and insufficient manpower to deal with child abuse issues.
Li Haoran's team urges the department to re-examine the relevant monitoring mechanism, rigidly stipulate training indicators for nursing staff, and establish a human resource management database for recipient institutions to avoid recurrence of tragedies.
The Review Committee on Child Residential Care and Related Services, chaired by the Director of the Social Welfare Department (SWD), held its first meeting last Tuesday (April 26). According to a document submitted to the Legislative Council by the Labour and Welfare Bureau, the Bureau acknowledged that the existing inspection mechanism has Improvements are needed, and the service quality will be improved according to the committee's recommendations.
The research team of the Legislative Council Election Committee Member Lee Ho-yin's Office took Tong Le Ju as a case study to explore the room for improvement in the SWD's supervision mechanism.
(Photo by Liu Mengting)
Seven shortcomings of SWD supervision
The research team of Li Haoran's office pointed out that although the Independent Review Committee of the Children's Protection Association has released the "Interim Report of the Independent Review Committee" at the end of January this year, the focus is to point out that the management of the Children's Fun House and the Children's Protection Association is insufficient, and it has not been extended to the Social Welfare Department. Regarding the monitoring of all non-profit organizations subsidized by the government, we decided to take Tong Leju as a case study and refer to other relevant reports on the work performance of the SWD, from which we have sorted out at least seven major deficiencies in the work of the SWD:
First, there is a lack of a mechanism to effectively count employee turnover rates in service units.
Tong Le Ju has been facing a serious manpower shortage, which has resulted in heavy workload and enormous pressure on the nursing staff. It is difficult to guarantee that they will not lose control of their emotions and vent through child abuse.
The "Interim Report" pointed out that Tong Leju's turnover rate from 2019 to 2021 was extremely high, reaching 84.4%, 31.7%, and 77%, respectively. Li Haoran's team compared the non-government figures of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service in 2019 and 2020. According to the organization salary survey data, it can be seen that Tong Leju is much higher than the average employee turnover rate of the interviewed institutions of 20.9% and 13.9%.
Although the Lump Sum Grant Independent Review Committee submitted a report in 2008, suggesting that the SWD should collect data on staff turnover and turnover rates, the Tong Leju incident made Li Haoran's team question the department's failure to implement the relevant work, because if the department knew about the problem , should intervene as soon as possible to assist the agency in recruiting more staff, so as not to pressure employees and refer them to innocent children.
Second, there was no timely response to the shortage of manpower.
The daytime and nighttime manpower ratios of the SWD for recipient organisations are 1:8 and 1:13 respectively. Researcher Huang Leyan of Li Haoran’s team pointed out that when the Child Care Centres Regulations were enacted in 1976, the government set the manpower ratio for children aged 0 to 2 years old. The lower limit of 1:6 was set, and by 1995, the staffing arrangement of kindergartens and child care centers was fixed at 1:8, but the ratio remained stagnant for more than 20 years without adjustment.
It was not until Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor proposed to optimize the manpower in the "2018 Policy Address" that the authorities proposed to change the manpower ratio of children aged 0 to 2 and children aged 2 to 3 to 1:6 and 1:11, but this is not "progress". It's just "returning to the starting point", and compared with South Korea at the same level of development, it is 1:3, and Finland and Australia are 1:4. The situation in Hong Kong is obviously extremely unsatisfactory, which shows that the authorities still have some room for adjustment.
Li Haoran's team also believes that the shortage of manpower is closely related to poor promotion opportunities, but the agency has not actively sought solutions.
Third, the current regulatory mechanism relies too much on institutional self-declaration and fails to detect problems early.
Li Haoran's team pointed out that in general, the SWD inspects other institutions at most once every three years, but in 2021, the "Tongleju" will be inspected 5 to 6 times, which is very frequent.
Huang Leyan therefore questioned that the SWD was likely to have noticed the abnormality so that it would make such frequent inspections.
However, since the SWD usually informs the agency in advance before the inspection, the employees are most likely to be psychologically prepared, and they will remind each other or cover up the misconduct internally.
Li Haoran's team is also puzzled by the service performance monitoring system adopted by the SWD and the too rudimentary "Service Performance Evaluation Manual", because it is assumed that all supervisors can report problems candidly, but the child abuse case of Tong Leju is highlighting the relevant loopholes. As long as someone conceals and underreports, the SWD will never know.
The Society for the Protection of Children established an independent review committee earlier and submitted the "Interim Review Report", which shows that Tong Le Ju has extremely absurd management flaws from top to bottom, but it has not touched on the responsibility of the Social Welfare Department.
The picture shows Xia Mu (left), chairman of the Executive Committee of the Society for the Protection of Children, bowing to apologize.
(Photo by Lu Yiming)
Fourth, the department failed to ensure that the recipient institutions set up a complaint management mechanism, and failed to do a good job in checking.
In the report submitted by the Independent Lump Sum Grant Review Committee in 2008 and the "Best Practice Guidelines" issued in 2014, the roles and responsibilities of organisations in handling complaints are clearly defined.
However, the "Interim Report" shows that even if some employees are dissatisfied with the childcare practices of Tongleju, and even discover child abuse early on, they are still unable to change the problem after reporting.
Li Haoran's team believes that this highlights that Tong Leju has not established a complaint management mechanism in accordance with the "Best Practice Guidelines" at all, and the SWD has not fulfilled its responsibility to ensure that each recipient organization has established a relevant mechanism in accordance with the guidelines. It can be seen that the SWD has not Do a good job in auditing and follow-up work.
Fifth, the official guidelines are not legally binding, and the SWD has not followed up on the implementation.
Li Haoran's team pointed out that although the SWD has revised the "Procedural Guidelines for Handling Child Abuse Cases" five times since 1981, the last revised guideline in 2020 was renamed "Procedural Guidelines for the Protection of Children from Abuse - Multi-professional Cooperation" In order to emphasize the shift in the focus of SWD's work, SWD has never asked the recipient organisations to explain the guidelines to their employees when the guidelines are not mandatory measures, nor has it thoroughly investigated whether the employees concerned clearly grasp the guidelines, making them useless.
Sixth, the SWD's Family and Child Protection Services Unit is under-staffed and cannot meet the needs of various districts.
According to the staffing establishment of the Social Welfare Department, among the 11 officially designated districts, each district has an average of only 21 staff dedicated to family and child protection services, which need to deal with child abuse, spouse abuse, and child custody.
Li Haoran's team conducted a combined analysis of the establishment of relevant professional grade positions and the population of the district aged 14 or below, and found that the manpower shortage in Shatin district was the most severe, reaching 1:4981; if the factor of temporary vacancies was taken into account, then There are 4 districts where the ratio exceeds 1:5000. In addition, there has been a significant upward trend in child abuse cases in recent years, which shows how serious the problem of insufficient manpower in the SWD is.
Seventh, the rotation arrangement of civil servants encourages passive work attitudes.
The SWD’s internal training system advocates that employees work in different departments every three years to accumulate experience and knowledge in different fields, but Li Haoran’s team believes that this rotation arrangement will also weaken employees’ ability to identify problems and solve them in innovative ways. positivity of the problem.
Huang Leyan said that employees are rotated once every three years, and it is difficult to promote, digest and follow up the whole set of reform projects.
At the same time, the cooperation relationship between the SWD and other government departments is complicated, and the powers and responsibilities are ambiguous, which in turn fosters a passive work mentality.
Huang Leyan also found that the ability levels of prospective child care workers trained by different institutions vary widely.
The team checked the database of the Education Bureau and found that there are 65 training courses offered by various institutions that have been approved by the Director of Social Services for registration as child care workers. Different, different admission requirements, in other words, lack of integration of the work scope of each department.
At the end of last year, it was revealed that at least 34 employees of "Tong Le Ju", a residential institution for young children under the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children, were suspected of abusing 40 children.
(file picture)
Five suggestions for "prescribe the right medicine"
Li Haoran believes that the Tong Leju incident has caused social uproar, and everyone thinks that it needs to be reviewed and improved, but the "Interim Report" lacks clear suggestions on how to make changes.
The SWD has announced in mid-month the establishment of a Review Committee on Residential Care and Related Services for Children chaired by the Director of SWD. Therefore, the research team put forward five suggestions for the reference of relevant members:
First, re-examine the monitoring mechanism of each subvented institution, and carefully study how to use them to optimize the inspection mechanism to strengthen inspection efforts and effectiveness.
In addition, when reviewing the application for funding grants by organizations with bad behavior records, additional provisions are added to ensure that the organization's services will be improved, such as deduction of points or blacklisting, etc. If the improvement is not improved, severe punishment will be imposed.
Second, re-examine the registration and training system for early childhood workers, such as imitating the registration system for social workers, setting clear standards for details such as course content structure and internship hours, and re-examining the existing list of approved courses to remove unqualified courses. course.
In addition, set a rigid target for the number of training courses that each institution should provide employees each year, and conduct regular random checks to ensure that the service units under each institution strictly implement the relevant indicators.
Third, establish a regular update schedule for each official document and guideline to ensure that each official document and guideline has a regular update schedule to ensure that each document and guideline are kept up-to-date and provide organisations with relevant information Forward-looking and relevant guidance for today's society.
Fourth, improve the human resources management system of NGOs.
First, the SWD should establish a human resources management database of non-governmental organizations to effectively count the manpower data of service units, so as to help the SWD to grasp the human resources management situation of each organization as early as possible, and to intervene as soon as possible when necessary; secondly, the SWD should It should be based on predictable social changes in the future and combined with the official population projections to ensure the sustainability of human resources; furthermore, the SWD re-examines the manpower ratio of different professional grades and formulates a roadmap for further improvement of the manpower ratio indicators and timetable, and put forward practical solutions to problems such as the lack of sufficient professionals; finally, with the professional grades of SWD, social workers, kindergarten teachers and other professional grades as reference objects, formulate clear promotion ladders and remuneration packages for child care workers guidelines and regulations.
Fifth, carry out the reform of the internal human resources system, clarify the relationship between powers and responsibilities on the work items of inter-departmental collaboration, and mobilize the enthusiasm of employees by establishing clear key performance indicators and reward and punishment mechanisms for each work item.
In addition, future social changes in Hong Kong, population estimates, and the actual needs of the public for various social services, etc., are taken into consideration when formulating long-term social welfare strategies and internal manpower deployment to ensure that existing human resources can be fully utilized and sufficient to meet future needs.
