The protection of children's rights is better than it was three years ago, but there is still much room for improvement, according to a report released yesterday by the Child Welfare League Foundation.
The foundation gave an overall score of just 76 out of 100 to the nation's protection of kids' rights, compared to a score of 71 on a similar survey three years ago.
The foundation based its evaluation on the 2005 Taiwan Children Rights Protection Survey, which was conducted via the Internet by the foundation and Yam Digital Technology Co from Oct. 20 to Oct. 31. The foundation gave scores on the present condition of children's rights, with a score of 60 or above a "passing" grade.
PHOTO: CHANG CHIA-MING, TAIPEI TIMES
The survey was divided into four categories: basic human rights for children, the right to social care, the right to be healthy and the right to be educated.
Alicia Wang (
This means that children's right to protection has not been sufficiently enforced, she said.
Compared to basic human rights, the right to be healthy was given a lower score of 70, since more than three-fourths of the children polled were worried about contracting illnesses such as bird flu, Wang said.
The children were mostly satisfied with their right to social care, although 20 percent of the children felt that adults are not fulfilling their child care responsibilities, Wang added.
The right to education was given the poorest grade of any category, with a score of 68. Most children said that they were under too much pressure at school and in cram schools, while some were afraid of being bullied in school or punished by teachers.
"What these children want is merely better treatment and more respect," Wang said. "They have the right to ask for that."
A group of children, hoping to voice their rights, gathered at the conference holding up signs with requests written on them ranging from "I hope that my parents will listen to me and respect me" to "I wish I had more pocket money and more time to watch TV or play computer games."
1,071 children were polled, and the survey had a 3 percent margin of error.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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