The Ministry of Health and Welfare yesterday apologized and announced plans to improve the nation’s adoption system after a one-year-old boy in foster care died after allegedly being abused by his caregiver.
In remarks to the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee, Minister of Health and Welfare Hsueh Jui-yuan (薛瑞元) said the boy’s death — which occurred in December last year, but only came to light in the past few weeks — exposed flaws in the design and implementation of Taiwan’s social safety net.
“On behalf of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, I apologize to the [boy’s] family and to society for these lapses, which led to the loss of a life,” Hsueh said.
Photo: CNA
In a five-page report submitted to the committee, the ministry reviewed factors that might have contributed to the incident and set out planned reforms to the adoption system.
Among the proposals, the assessment of a family’s need to put their child up for adoption would be handled by local governments, rather than adoption agencies, the ministry said.
Making local governments responsible for the assessments would eliminate possible conflicts of interest for adoption agencies — which receive money from prospective adoptive parents — and would enable governments to provide additional support to the family considering giving up their child, the report said.
Currently, adoption agencies are responsible for placing a child in foster care during the adoption process, despite that they often have limited budgets and might not have long-term contracted caregivers who are well-suited to a particular child’s needs, it said.
To resolve that problem, local governments would be responsible for placing children in foster care as they await adoption, and would cover related expenses, with help from the central government if necessary, it said.
Home-based caregivers contracted to act as foster parents during the adoption process must be subject to stricter supervision than those who are employed as nannies, the report said.
To that end, the ministry would hold discussions with local governments on increasing the frequency of visits to children in foster care, as well as improving training and possibly offering higher salaries for caregivers, it said.
The ministry would evaluate how to help adoption agencies’ social workers — who also visit children in foster care — improve their professional knowledge and better identify signs of abuse, it said.
At the same time, records of the social workers’ visits would be submitted to local governments, so that they can follow up on any cases in which suspicions of abuse have been raised, the report said.
The meeting at one point descended into disarray as Democratic Progressive Party lawmakers said that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) was unfit to chair the meeting, as she had been a board member of the Child Welfare League Foundation (CWLF), which placed the boy in foster care.
Wang on Thursday resigned from the board.
Separately yesterday, the CWLF said its board of directors had accepted the resignation of chief executive officer Pai Li-fang (白麗芳) in the wake of the infant’s death.
Despite her departure, Pai would stay on as part of a working group reviewing the foundation’s handling of the incident, a report on which would be submitted to the ministry on Monday, it said.
Last week, prosecutors also questioned and released on bail a 29-year-old CWLF social worker who handled the boy’s case, amid suspicion that she might have falsified reports on the monthly welfare checks she was supposed to make to his foster home.
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