Seventy percent of elementary students nationwide are afraid of being abducted, with 54 percent fearing that they will accidentally plunge to their deaths from high-rise apartments.
Fear was the message yesterday from the Child Welfare League Foundation, a local non-profit organization (NPO) devoted to improving the nation's child welfare services.
With Children's Day, a UN holiday honoring youth, just two days away, the foundation released the results of a survey yesterday indicating that the majority of Taiwanese children feel unsafe at home and in school.
In addition to widespread fears among youth about falling prey to kidnappers or accidents in the home, the survey also indicated that 21 percent of children are regularly struck by their parents, with 19.3 percent often sustaining injuries at home.
The foundation polled 1,791 elementary students in 23 counties and cities for the survey, according to a foundation press release.
"When children walk out onto the street, they're afraid. We need to ask ourselves: What kind of environment are our kids growing up in?" said foundation spokeswoman "Hsiao-min" (
With six child panelists looking on, the foundation flipped through a PowerPoint presentation featuring newspaper headlines of incest, murder and suicide cases involving children at the start of the conference. Dark, forboding music from the film The Hours was played as reporters filed in.
Officials from the ministries of the interior and education were on hand to hold a scripted dialogue with the school-age panelists.
"National Policy Agency [NPA] Aunty, what can you do about the kidnapping problem involving children?" 11-year-old "Hsiao-huang" (
"Always be at least an arm's length away from strangers when they talk to you," NPA official Liu Chen-ju (
Reading from a scrap of paper, "A-liang" (
According to the foundation, 320,000 elementary students nationwide spend more than an hour commuting to their respective schools in the morning.
Flipping through a pile of notes, Huang recited her ministry's rules and regulations on the merging of schools, and told the 12-year-old that the ministry was concerned about the yawning wealth gap between the nation's rural and urban populations.
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck off the coast of Hualien County in eastern Taiwan at 7pm yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The epicenter of the temblor was at sea, about 69.9km south of Hualien County Hall, at a depth of 30.9km, it said. There were no immediate reports of damage resulting from the quake. The earthquake’s intensity, which gauges the actual effect of a temblor, was highest in Taitung County’s Changbin Township (長濱), where it measured 5 on Taiwan’s seven-tier intensity scale. The quake also measured an intensity of 4 in Hualien, Nantou, Chiayi, Yunlin, Changhua and Miaoli counties, as well as
Taiwan is to have nine extended holidays next year, led by a nine-day Lunar New Year break, the Cabinet announced yesterday. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday next year matches the length of this year’s holiday, which featured six extended holidays. The increase in extended holidays is due to the Act on the Implementation of Commemorative and Festival Holidays (紀念日及節日實施條例), which was passed early last month with support from the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party. Under the new act, the day before Lunar New Year’s Eve is also a national holiday, and Labor Day would no longer be limited
The first tropical storm of the year in the western North Pacific, Wutip (蝴蝶), has formed over the South China Sea and is expected to move toward Hainan Island off southern China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. The agency said a tropical depression over waters near the Paracel and Zhongsha islands strengthened into a tropical storm this morning. The storm had maximum sustained winds near its center of 64.8kph, with peak gusts reaching 90kph, it said. Winds at Beaufort scale level 7 — ranging from 50kph to 61.5kph — extended up to 80km from the center, it added. Forecaster Kuan Hsin-ping
COMMITMENTS: The company had a relatively low renewable ratio at 56 percent and did not have any goal to achieve 100 percent renewable energy, the report said Pegatron Corp ranked the lowest among five major final assembly suppliers in progressing toward Apple Inc’s commitment to be 100 percent carbon neutral by 2030, a Greenpeace East Asia report said yesterday. While Apple has set the goal of using 100 percent renewable energy across its entire business, supply chain and product lifecycle by 2030, carbon emissions from electronics manufacturing are rising globally due to increased energy consumption, it said. Given that carbon emissions from its supply chain accounted for more than half of its total emissions last year, Greenpeace East Asia evaluated the green transition performance of Apple’s five largest final
RSS