Tragedy sparks call for more ethnic minority social workers

Anju Ghising is one of the city’s small number of social workers from ethnic minority backgrounds that serve people who only speak Nepalese, Hindi, Urdu or English and need help with everything from finding jobs to mental health counselling.

A Nepali who moved to the city as a teenager, the 33-year-old has dedicated her professional life to helping people from her community overcome their struggles.

“Growing up, I could see older people without support suffering with mental health issues,” she said, adding that people from the city’s minority communities often felt stranded, especially when it came to finding help.

“These people often deal with strict religions, very defined gender roles, arranged marriages, language barriers and struggle to find jobs … On top of that, many do not speak Cantonese and English is not their first language.”

The mental well-being of the city’s ethnic minority communities and the services available to them was in the spotlight last month, after a 29-year-old Indian woman was charged with murdering her three young daughters in a subdivided flat in Sham Shui Po. The woman had no record of mental illness and had moved there with her children about a year ago, after suspecting that her husband was unfaithful.

Responding to the tragedy, six NGOs – the Zubin Foundation, Hong Kong Unison, KELY Support Group, Health in Action, Harmony House and HKSKH Lady MacLehose Centre, Services for Ethnic Minorities – appealed jointly to the authorities to ensure that ethnic minority communities received the support they needed.

They said it was urgent to raise the number of ethnic minority social workers and mental health professionals to provide “culturally sensitive services”.

Only 21 of the city’s 27,373 registered social workers were from an ethnic minority, and the NGOs estimated that they served a total of more than 600,000 people. Checks by the Post found that few students from ethnic minority communities took up social work or related degrees because most did not meet the universities’ Chinese language requirements for admission.

Ghising, who speaks Urdu and specialises in mental well-being, moved to the city in 2007 when she was 16 and obtained a master’s degree in social work from the University of Hong Kong in 2017. People from ethnic minority backgrounds had added pressures that could lead to mental health issues, and the shortage of social workers meant some in desperate situations could slip through the safety net, Ghising explained.

The Hospital Authority, which oversees all public health institutions, said it did not keep figures for the ethnic background of its employees, but added the city’s hospitals and clinics had interpreters covering 17 languages.

But Cassy Chan Ying-tung, assistant manager of the public policy division at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), said interpreters alone could not solve problems arising from the language barrier. “Interpreters are strangers, and this deters patients from opening up and telling their full story,” she said.

Counsellor Asha Kurian, 34, said the language barrier was a major reason minority groups felt alienated from government services. “People prefer a counsellor or mental health practitioner who understands their culture and talks to them in their own language,” said Kurian, who is Indian and works alongside various NGOs.

Getting more young people from ethnic minority communities to become social workers would make a difference, but accessing available courses posed a challenge for most because of their lack of proficiency in Cantonese.

Pakistani Hongkonger Waqas Butt, 27, who obtained his bachelor’s degree in social work in 2019, said: “Cantonese is used for class discussions and case analyses, so those who want to study social work need high scores in the language.”

He had only a basic grasp of Cantonese. But language was an issue after he graduated and started looking for work. “If you want to study or work full-time in Hong Kong, Chinese is not an option, but compulsory,” said Butt, who took two months to land a job with an NGO.

John Tse Wing-ling, executive director of NGO Hong Kong Unison, which serves ethnic minority groups, said it was unrealistic to expect more ethnic minority social workers to be produced quickly. “The government, universities and employers should sit down and lower the Chinese requirement.”

Dr Yam Kong, head of Polytechnic University’s social work bachelor’s degree programme, told the Post very few ethnic minority students applied for the course. “We have been open to them and tailored interviews in English only for ethnic minority applicants,” he said.