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 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