Welfare minister Chris Sun said on Wednesday that it would be rather difficult to set a time frame as to how quickly the authorities should make public allegations of sexual abuse against residents of care homes for disabled people. At a full council meeting in the legislature, Roundtable lawmaker Michael Tien noted that it took officials two months to announce an alleged incident earlier this year, and said he found it unacceptable that there is no set criteria for revealing such suspected incidents. In reply, Sun said the circumstances of each alleged incident are always different and if a time frame is set that is too short, this might cause the mishandling of cases, adding that if the time frame was too long, people might question why the announcement did not come sooner. "It's impossible for us to set a fixed time frame for announcements, and we have to take into consideration the unique nature of every such incident," he told lawmakers during a Q&A session. "We do have to take care of the emotions of the victims as well as their family members, and we will try to announce such incidents as early as possible." In October, officials amended a code of practice for care homes for the disabled, including setting out policies on installing CCTV and reviewing the footage. Lawmaker Connie Lam, who's a social worker by trade, pointed out that while most care homes have installed surveillance cameras, they often are too understaffed to check the footage. In response, Sun said there could be "riskier" periods such as when there are fewer people at the homes at weekends, and staff could review footage of those periods more regularly. Sun said in the long run, officials hope artificial intelligence can help with such monitoring work.
