In the case of Kai Kai (剴剴) — a one-year-old boy who died, allegedly from abuse by a Taipei nanny surnamed Liu (劉) — a Child Welfare League Foundation (兒福聯盟) social worker was handcuffed and detained by police for falsifying home visit records and failing to detect the abuse at an early stage.
Meanwhile, many are wondering why the Taipei City Government’s Department of Health did not include the boy in the government’s Specialized Doctor Child Care Program.
The handling of the case has caused panic among medical groups online, with doctors worried that they could also be held accountable for failing to detect child abuse cases in a timely manner. Some are planning to withdraw from the program.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare launched the Specialized Doctor Child Care Pilot Program in 2020. The ministry invited health bureaus throughout the nation to incorporate a “list of children under the age of three in high-risk and vulnerable families” provided by social care bureaus with their designated cases, and assigned them to specialized doctors who would regularly monitor the children’s health and development.
Why was Kai Kai not included in the program? Taipei City’s Health and Social Welfare departments should provide an explanation.
Had he been included, the abuse might have been detected at an early stage through home visits stipulated in the doctor care plan.
However, even if Kai Kai was included in the specialized doctor program, would the tragedy have been avoided?
It is doubtful, because apart from meeting with the children in clinics and making phone calls to encourage those looking after them to send them for vaccinations and regular health check-ups, the program only has home visits for high-risk children once or twice a year.
During such visits, doctors might not necessarily be able to detect child abuse unless the child’s health is extremely poor or they have new or old wounds that cannot be reasonably explained during a medical examination. Doctors are naturally obliged to report a suspected case of child abuse to health or social bureaus.
However, abused children are usually not taken to a hospital by abusive nannies or parents, so how can such cases be detected?
Instead of doctors, perhaps neighbors are more likely to notice whether a child is abused. Therefore, communities should be encouraged to report cases of child abuse to the police.
Otherwise, doctors might withdraw from the program if they are worried about being handcuffed someday, just like the Child Welfare League Foundation social worker — despite the fact that they were actually being investigated for forging home visit records.
Lin Yung-zen is president of the Taiwan Primary Care Association and a supervisor of the Taiwan Pediatric Association.
Translated by Eddy Chang
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS