( dpa ) - Police are regularly called out to deal with children left home alone in Hong Kong, but proposals to introduce a law to combat the trend have been dismissed, a news report said Thursday.
Labour and Welfare Secretary Matthew Cheung said police dealt with 49 cases of children being left unattended at home from 2005 to last year, the South China Morning Post reported.
In seven cases, children left home alone were involved in accidents and one of the cases involved a fatality, the newspaper quoted Cheung as saying.
However, Cheung argued that public education was the way to tackle the problem and said the government had no plans to make leaving children unattended at home a criminal offence despite pleas from child welfare groups.
A survey earlier this year suggested the trend was far more widespread and that many cases of abandonment are never reported to police.
Nine out of 10 Hong Kong children aged 11 and under have been left home alone by their parents at some stage and one in eight have been left alone overnight, the survey by the Boys and Girls Clubs Association found.
In January, two Hong Kong single mothers were sentenced to probation after admitting abandoning their children - in one case a 14-year-old boy and in the other girls aged 8 and 9 - for days on end to go gambling in Macau.
Sociologists said that the trend is partly caused by a lack of child-care facilities for working couples in the densely populated city of 6.9 million.