Social workers specializing in child protection are being seriously exploited, lawmakers and social groups said yesterday.
Social workers involved in protecting children from abuse face heavy workloads and long working hours and cannot protect themselves from danger, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) said.
Many social workers are hired as part-time or temporary workers and earn minimal pay, while those employed by the government are asked by local authorities to perform tasks unrelated to their main job, said Wang, a former CEO of the Child Welfare League Foundation.
Wang released a ranking showing the 10 counties and cities in Taiwan with the lowest ratio of children to social workers who are working on child abuse cases. Hualien County topped the list, with only one social worker per 256 cases, followed by Taitung and Yilan counties.
Eva Teng (滕西華), president of the Taipei Association of Licensed Social Workers, accused local authorities of late payment to social workers, saying one-third of the counties and cities listed still owed wages, adding that she was angry that social workers are hired as part-time or temporary workers.
“Can social welfare and sexual assault prevention work be handed to part-time workers?” she asked.
Wang also urged the ministry to hand the management of social workers to the central government, rather than local governments, and asked the Council of Labor Affairs to bolster inspections of social workers’ employment conditions.
In response, Chen Su-chun (陳素春), deputy director of the ministry’s Department of Social Affairs, said her department would strive to provide the information.
Child Welfare Bureau Director-General Chang Hsiu-yuan (張秀鴛) said her agency would increase the number of social workers each year and would make hiring social workers involved in protecting children its first priority.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus yesterday said it opposes the introduction of migrant workers from India until a mechanism is in place to prevent workers from absconding. Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on Thursday told the Legislative Yuan that the first group of migrant workers from India could be introduced as early as this year, as part of a government program. The caucus’ opposition to the policy is based on the assessment that “the risk is too high,” KMT caucus secretary-general Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) said. Taiwan has a serious and long-standing problem of migrant workers absconding from their contracts, indicating that
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