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Abstract
Permanency planning has been a major concern in the child care field in the West for almost two decades. The first comprehensive study on residential child care in Hong Kong found that a substantial proportion of the children in care had been transferred from one residential facility to another. Their parents suffered from more health, economic and social maladjustment problems than parents of the other children in care. Can this account for the length of time these children were to spend in care? Comparison made among the children involved in four types of movement reveals significant differences in age at admission and parenting deficiency. This reflects the implicit yardstick employed in placing children in different care settings, and the systemic function of institutional care. The concept of permanency planning is reexamined in the Hong Kong context.
Notes
∗Both authors are lecturers in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration, The University of Hong Kong. Mary Ho got her CQSW and M.Phil (Social Work) at the University of York. She had worked for ten years in a residential treatment centre for adolescent girls before joining the University as a field instructor. Tony Tam got his Master of Social Work degree, specializing in social work research, at the University of Toronto. He has been practitioner and teacher in the fields of social planning and research after graduation.