A child protection group yesterday urged the public to pay more attention to the abused children in their communities, following a tragedy on Tuesday in which a woman killed her one-year-old girl by throwing her from their 11th-storey apartment.
"Children are important re-sources for our country's future development," the Taiwan Fund for Children and Families said yesterday in a statement.
"Therefore, the responsibility of providing a quality upbringing environment for our children does not only rest on their families' shoulders, but also on society's," it said.
A foundation study of 635 child abuse cases last year revealed that 41 percent of child abusers were parents in dysfunctional marriages.
Other factors in abuse cases included poverty, mood swings, lack of support system, unemployment and alcoholism.
The prosecutor investigating the death of the Tienmu toddler has received a court order allowing him to detain the mother, Tung Chiu-yun (董秋雲), on a murder charge and send her for a psychiatric examination.
Reports said that Tung became unemployed six months ago and suffered from depression. Tung and her husband, both college graduates, had reportedly been arguing a lot recently.
Early Tuesday morning, after quarreling with her husband, Tung dropped her daughter from their apartment's balcony. She later woke the family's Vietnamese maid to inform her of the incident.
The maid immediately woke other members of the family.
The previous day, Tung's three-year-old son was rushed to Cheng Hsin Rehabilitation Medical Center for treatment to a neck injury.
According to Lin Chien-sheng (林建盛), director of the center's emergency room, the boy's vital signs were very weak when he arrived but he survived surgery and is now in an intensive-care unit.
In response to criticism that the hospital did not report the potential child-abuse case, Lin said that the injury did concern the attending physicians, especially as the family claimed it was an accident.
"We did question the boy's father and grandmother about the cause of the injury, but were told that the injury took place when the boy was playing with a knife during a meal," Lin said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching