Every child in Hong Kong has a right to be protected from all forms of abuse. At Mother’s Choice, we serve over 100 children at any one time. These children, who are currently not living in a safe, loving, and permanent family, are some of the most vulnerable people in our society and they deserve the highest level of care, protection, and respect.

Working in the child welfare field is not easy. Our teams step into the most difficult moments in the lives of infants, children, pregnant girls, and families. We accompany our clients in hospitals, in courtrooms, and in their own homes. In a residential care setting, the amount of work that goes into smoothly and safely providing a home for babies and children is a great task as we operate 24/7, keep running rosters of trained and committed childcare workers and volunteers, with the added complications of keeping them safe from COVID. It takes courage to continue to serve with such dedication and love, putting children at the center of everything we do.

It is so important to stand up for children, but we can often feel helpless, not knowing what to do when our heart, body, or mind is telling us that a child we know may not be safe. We can all support and encourage one another to take small action steps to see children protected:

First, we can educate ourselves. Mother’s Choice extends an open invitation to complete our online child protection training, which at its core reminds us how to prevent, respond to, and report child abuse. This training is completed by our staff, volunteers, and foster families as part of equipping teams to uphold and embed our child protection standards and values into their work, practice, and hearts.

We can also take notice of the vulnerable children around us, especially those in families who are isolated and alone. Befriending and walking alongside a struggling family, including young single parents, can make a world of difference to a child’s sense of safety and security.

Our child protection activities at Mother’s Choice help us build a team that values and prioritizes the safety and best interests of children. To find out more about our commitment to child safeguarding, please visit our Child Protection page or email info@motherschoice.org.

We believe it takes a village to raise a child. When our community joins hands together, we can create safe, child friendly environments where every child is respected, protected, and heard.

Our vision at Mother’s Choice is to see every child in a safe, loving, and permanent family. Whether we are caring for babies and children in our Child Care Home, Foster Care, Project Bridge; walking with young girls and mothers through our Pregnant Girls Services and Youth Services; and supporting children and families along the lifelong journey of adoption, we are committed to do everything we can to keep them safe from harm.

We are pleased to announce that on Monday 25 January 2021, Mother’s Choice achieved the Keeping Children Safe, Level 2 Certification. This reflects the hard work of our teams across all of our services to show that we are implementing a comprehensive child safeguarding framework that meets stringent international standards for protecting children and youth from harm, and ensures there will be an appropriate response to any concerns should they occur.

Our Child Protection policies and procedures guide how we recruit and train our teams of staff, volunteers through our Human Resources and Volunteer Engagement departments, how we manage children’s data through our IT and Operations systems, how we keep children safe at our locations through our Facilities and Administration, and how we share stories of our children with confidentiality and dignity through our Marketing Communications. Our goal is to ensure that we are doing our best in every aspect of our work at Mother’s Choice.

At Mother’s Choice, we believe child protection is everyone’s responsibility. Over the past two years, over 1,000 members of our team have signed our Child Protection Code of Conduct and completed training on how to identify respond to, and report child abuse, and every member has an important role to play as we create safe, child friendly environments where children and youth are respected, protected, and heard.

This certification represents the tremendous efforts every member of our team of staff, volunteers, partners, foster families, donors, and supporters have made to ensure that we can build an organization that keeps the safety of children as the highest priority, so that we can achieve our vision to see every child in a loving family.

To learn more about child protection at Mother’s Choice, please visit our website: https://www.motherschoice.org/en/what-we-do/for-children/child-protection/

For over 30 years, Mother’s Choice has stepped into crisis in the lives of vulnerable children, youth, and at-risk families. Our vision is to see every child in a safe, loving, and permanent family, surrounded by a supportive community.  Whilst the current global pandemic brings uncertainty to all of us, we know that it is always the vulnerable in a community who become even more vulnerable in a crisis. Yet, we also believe that crisis can be a turning point in someone’s life, and an opportunity for the community to work together.

We can already see signs of the negative impact that Covid-19 is having on vulnerable children, here in Hong Kong, and across the world. These are triggered by school and playground closures, the pressure of home-learning and lack of routine, work and financial stress on parents, and the lack of support as families are separated during hospitalization and quarantine.

We also see some children who are isolated at home with abusive family members, disconnected from the safe adults who they might usually turn, to including teachers, medical professionals, and faith communities. With the world now connecting online, children are also exposed to more sexually explicit material due to the greater demand for child sexual images. Children may be victims of emotional abuse as a result of increased stress of parents, and are increasingly left alone as parents have little childcare support.

Child abuse can be physical, sexual, and emotional in nature, and exploiting and neglecting children is also a form of abuse. Identifying child abuse at the present time may be more challenging than usual – we may not see children to notice bruises or marks on their bodies, and in this time of great uncertainty, it is difficult to tell whether behavioural changes in children point to abuse or neglect.

Our goal at Mother’s Choice has always been to be a safe haven for vulnerable children without family and young girls in crisis who have nowhere else to turn. We have seen an 80% increase in calls to our crisis hotline in the past month, as well as increased demand for our residential child care and foster services. With the residential child care system already stretched to full capacity, it will become overwhelmed with more children requiring a safe, loving and temporary place to stay in the coming weeks. But we cannot do this alone. We need our community to be vigilant and to speak up when they recognize signs of child abuse so that we can keep children safe and support struggling families.

Here are the different ways that you can respond:

1. Call to report – If you have concerns that a child you know is being abused or neglected, report to the police or ambulance in an emergency, or the Social Welfare Department. [https://www.swd.gov.hk/storage/asset/section/224/en/FCPSU_Leaflet_Feb_2018_Chi_EN.pdf]
2. Get trained – If you are interested in learning more about how to identify, respond to, and report child protection concerns, for a limited period of time, Mother’s Choice is offering our one-hour online child protection training for free to non-staff and volunteers. Please contact info@motherschoice.org to get started.
3. Open your home – If you have love, space, and stability to offer a safe and temporary home to a child, we encourage you to sign up to our online Project Bridge Information Session to start the journey to find out more.
4. Donate – With financial challenges all around us, it takes even more courage to give. However, this season has shown us that helping the children, youth, and families we serve is more important than ever. Please consider donating during this time so we can make sure we can keep our doors open to those in crisis. [https://www.motherschoice.org/en/donate]

What else is Mother’s Choice doing?

1. We are Open! – Demand for our services is only growing, and Mother’s Choice is still running all essential services, including our 24-hour Child Care Home for babies and young children, Project Bridge and Foster Family services, Pregnant Girls Services hostel, crisis hotline, and counseling, and adoption support. We are still admitting infants, children, and young girls into our care, and have put strict health measures in place to ensure safety for our clients, staff and volunteers.
2. Child Protection Training – All our staff and volunteers have taken online child protection training over the past year to equip them to identify, respond to, and report abuse.
3. Supporting our Families – Children in our foster and adoptive families who have experienced previous trauma and challenges can find changes to routine and uncertainty very difficult, and we’re here to support our families to be safe and loving homes for children through the journey.
4. Keeping Children Safe – Through our membership and accreditation with Keeping Children Safe, we’re constantly ensuring our child protection policies are at global standards so we can ensure that children are kept safe in our care.

At Mother’s Choice, even as we step into the darkest moments of our clients’ lives, we believe there is hope. It takes courage to step out in faith to support the most vulnerable, and we could not do it without the commitment and support of our Mother’s Choice family of staff, volunteers, donors, and partners.

Protection of children is of the utmost importance to Mother’s Choice. In response to the child protection crisis in our city, we have dedicated significant resources over recent years to develop a set of robust and comprehensive child safeguarding measures that are held to the highest international standards yet also locally relevant.

There are four “international child safeguarding standards”:

Standard 1 – Policy:  Mother’s Choice develops a policy that describes how it is committed to preventing and responding appropriately to, harm to children

Standard 2 – People: The organisation places clear responsibilities and expectations on its staff and associates and supports them to understand and act in line with these

Standard 3 – Procedures: The organisation creates a child-safe environment through implementing child safeguarding procedures that are applied across the organisation

Standard 4 – Accountability:  The organisation monitors and reviews its safeguarding measures

We are pleased to announce that Mother’s Choice, in August 2019, has achieved Level 1 Certification with Keeping Children Safe, the only provider in the world of audit services based on international child safeguarding standards.  Mother’s Choice is now part of a global network who are united in our commitment to protect the world’s most vulnerable children from exploitation and abuse.

Today, 100% of our staff have completed the “Introduction to Child Protection” training, an interactive, animated eLearning that teaches the importance of child protection and how to identify signs of child abuse, respond in a way that keeps children safe and follow our transparent reporting procedures.  Upon completion, each person signs our Child Protection Code of Conduct. Now in the next phase, this training is being rolled out to the more than 500 volunteers who work at Mother’s Choice.

It takes a village to raise a child, and each one of us has a responsibility to make sure that we do all we can to keep children safe while they are in our care and when they attend our programs. We are very grateful to Macquarie Group Foundation for their support, on so many levels, and in making Hong Kong a safer place for children – thank you for being part of our village!

To learn more about our child protection policies and training at Mother’s Choice, please watch our video, and contact info@motherschoice.org if you would like to learn more.

[1] Social Welfare Department (2019) Newly Reported Child Abuse Cases

[2] Social Welfare Department (2017) Child Protection Registry Statistical Report