The number of children missing after running away from home has risen by 10 percent over the past three years, the Missing Children Data Resource Center said yesterday.
Center director Lin Wu-hsiung (林武雄) told a press conference that the percentage of children who went missing after running away from home in the center’s database hit 84.6 percent last year, from 73.7 percent in 2006.
The trend was also evident in figures released by the National Police Agency, which showed that 8,210, or 72.4 percent, of the 11,337 minors currently listed as missing had run away from home, Lin said.
PHOTO: CHIEN JUNG-FONG, TAIPEI TIMES
Among the runaways in the center’s database over the past three years, 57.5 percent were teenagers who had been attending junior high school, Lin said, adding that the majority were 15-year-olds.
Missing children who had been found by the center between 2006 and last year said they had stayed with boyfriends, friends, classmates or Internet friends after running away, Lin said.
More than 60 percent of the children who were found said they had run away from home more than twice, Lin said, adding that they left home a second or third time because the communication barrier between them and their family members had remained unchanged.
“Many said they left home on impulse, but later realized that running away was not as much fun as they imagined it would be,” Lin said.
Ministry of the Interior Children’s Bureau secretary-general Chen Kun-huang (陳坤皇) urged parents to enhance communication with their children by listening, understanding and appreciating children’s needs and spending more time with them.
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