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.
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The Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Wanda-Zhonghe Line is 81.7 percent complete, with public opening targeted for the end of 2027, New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) said today. Surrounding roads are to be open to the public by the end of next year, Hou said during an inspection of construction progress. The 9.5km line, featuring nine underground stations and one depot, is expected to connect Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall Station to Chukuang Station in New Taipei City’s Jhonghe District (中和). All 18 tunnels for the line are complete, while the main structures of the stations and depot are mostly finished, he
Taipei is to implement widespread road closures around Taipei 101 on Friday to make way for large crowds during the Double Ten National Day celebration, the Taipei Department of Transportation said. A four-minute fireworks display is to be launched from the skyscraper, along with a performance by 500 drones flying in formation above the nearby Nanshan A21 site, starting at 10pm. Vehicle restrictions would occur in phases, they said. From 5pm to 9pm, inner lanes of Songshou Road between Taipei City Hall and Taipei 101 are to be closed, with only the outer lanes remaining open. Between 9pm and 9:40pm, the section is
China’s plan to deploy a new hypersonic ballistic missile at a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) base near Taiwan likely targets US airbases and ships in the western Pacific, but it would also present new threats to Taiwan, defense experts said. The New York Times — citing a US Department of Defense report from last year on China’s military power — on Monday reported in an article titled “The missiles threatening Taiwan” that China has stockpiled 3,500 missiles, 1.5 times more than four years earlier. Although it is unclear how many of those missiles were targeting Taiwan, the newspaper reported
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