Advocacy Journey Promoting Child Sexual Abuse Prevention in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

In a country without a mandatory child abuse reporting system, advocacy for child welfare law can be a tedious and difficult process. This article documents a 10-year advocacy journey based on the capacity-building concept in social sustainability theory which aims to: raise public awareness of child sexual abuse, provide an idea for branding an inquiry column, and connect advocacy efforts to law reforms. Over the past decade in Hong Kong, a total of 336 public inquiries were anonymously sent to Wu Miu Column and published in three local major newspapers. Among these inquiries, 131 inquiries involved child sexual abuse that the “affected individuals” were molested in school or at home and knew the abusers but did not report their cases to child protection services. Inquirers reported more male than female abusers. Proportionally and significantly, female abusers tended to abuse younger children, compared to male abusers who tended to abuse older children. Many abusers were minors who abused younger children, which explains people’s reluctance to report the abuse to child protection services. The discovery of this underage phenomenon motivated child advocates to challenge the common law presumption that a boy under the age of 14 is incapable of sexual intercourse. Social workers in this advocacy journey must sustain continuous efforts to prevent youth from becoming future perpetrators.

KEYWORDS:

• Capacity building
• common law presumption
• e-channel
• newspaper column
• same-sex abuse
• underage perpetrators

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the End Child Sexual Abuse Foundation staff and board of directors for their continuous commitment to help children and families understand the importance of child sexual abuse prevention.

Disclosure of interest

This article is based on a policy reform project conducted by the first author as a member of the Advocacy Committee of the End Child Sexual Abuse Foundation. The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical standards and informed consent

With full compliance to all ethical standards in social research, the authors describe the process of an advocacy journey only from public record. None of the data contained any individual or personal identifying information and therefore no informed consent was required.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Monit Cheung

Monit Cheung, Graduate College of Social Work, University of Houston, Houston, Texas.

Carol A. Leung

Carol A. Leung, Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles, California.

Elaine Suk-Ching Liu

Elaine Suk-Ching Liu, Department of Applied Social Studies, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.