The Parents' Association for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities (智障者家長總會) and experts yesterday urged the public to keep an open mind toward mentally handicapped people and asked the government to integrate its departments to offer better help and resources for these people.
"Only 6 percent of mentally handicapped people in Taiwan have obtained professional care, while the other 94 percent are still cared for by their families," said Sun I-hsin (孫一信), the association's deputy secretary-general.
According to a Chinese-language newspaper report on Sunday, a single mother of two mentally handicapped sons in Kaohsiung had sex with her children for four years because she feared her two sons might rape other women on uncontrolled sexual impulses.
She first had sex with her older son four years ago when he was 16, then her younger son demanded sex after seeing what happened between his brother and mother.
Recently, the mother decided to seek the help of medical professionals because her second son started to attack her and injure himself after she started to reject his sexual advances.
Sun said he was unhappy with the way the doctor who treated the family had revealed the story to the media.
He said the doctor should not have told the media about the case explicitly, but consulted Kaohsiung City's social welfare department first. Sun also complained about the inefficiency of the authorities in dealing with mentally handicapped people.
"Our social welfare system adopts a passive attitude -- unless families take the initiative to ask for help or some tragic event occurs, the welfare system won't intervene and keep track of the mentally handicapped," Sun said.
Sun said this case showed that the burden of caring for mentally handicapped people still falls on families. He said there was no data showing mentally handicapped were more likely than normal people to commit sexual crimes.
PFP Legislator Chin Hui-chu (
Chin said she had heard of other unusual cases that could distort the public's view of mentally handicapped people. In one, a woman forced her handicapped daughter to have a hysterectomy because she was worried the daughter would get pregnant. In another, a man took his handicapped son to a brothel to satisfy the son's sexual needs.
Chin said tragedies and uninformed solutions to problems occurred because of the lack of help from the government.
Professor Ko Ping-shun (
"The mentally handicapped are definitely teachable and it just takes a well-planned program, which is what we lack," Ko said.
He said the government should integrate its departments dealing with education, health and social welfare and start to track the mentally handicapped as early as possible and give them help when necessary.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods