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SCMP Reporter

Q Should savage tree pruning be classified as felling?

The difference between skilled tree pruning and felling is whether the tree will survive at the end of the process.

Skilled tree pruning will save the trees from continuous damage from ant infestation or bacterial infection, just like surgery to save a patient's life.

However, trees face much harsher and more dangerous treatment than humans.

Medical surgeons are at least  highly educated and well-trained in  their field, but the tree 'surgeons'  receive no training at all.

Therefore, their raw  skills make pruning a savage event for trees and  end up killing  thousands of trees.

Such savage pruning is no different from felling a tree on purpose.

I hope the government will only allow qualified people to prune trees because  they are  valuable assets of our society.

Davies Parker, Tung Chung

Q Should counselling be mandatory for abusive spouses?

I support mandatory counselling for perpetrators of domestic violence.

I do not know, however, if Hong Kong is ready or prepared for it.

Your recent report suggests that there were 30,000 victims, but did  not tell us about the number of convicted abusers.

Even if we were to take a conservative figure of 10,000, I do not believe we have the trained personnel available to provide such a service.

Your report further quotes a Social Welfare Department official as saying that judges have the option of making counselling  a condition in the probation order.

The question is: in such cases of domestic violence, have the judges been told that the Social Welfare Department or the probation officers recommend a period of mandatory counselling?

Domestic violence has been the subject of many years of reviews,  lots of reports,  lots of studies and even catchy policy utterances of 'zero tolerance'. Yet we do not appear to have moved forward in any way. Perhaps it is  time to get the future candidates for chief executive to tell us what concrete measures  they intend to put in place.

Dr Philip Beh, Pok Fu Lam

Family violence leads to misery and trauma for children and it should be prevented by any means.

Very often, abusive spouses are the source of conflicts.

The cause of their emotional disturbance lies in the enormous amount of stress they have to withstand and ignorance of appropriate ways to express their unhappiness.

In the end, they choose to beat their spouses to externalise their anger. It may already be too late to remedy the situation.

Therefore, for the sake of other family members and the unity of the family, counselling should be made mandatory for abusive spouses.

Shannon Lee, Tsing Yi

Counselling should be made compulsory for abusive partners. The number of cases of family tragedies is still escalating alarmingly.

How to deal with this problem has long been a controversial issue.

In light of the successful counselling programmes launched in other countries, Hong Kong can learn from them.

The word 'counselling' may be somewhat misleading. Whenever we speak of 'counselling', what immediately springs to mind will probably be 'boring lectures'.

In reality, a counselling programme takes different forms: there will be an assortment of activities, including workshops, role-playing, lectures and the like. Partners can learn how to express themselves effectively and properly through interactive classes.

Meanwhile, they can put themselves in  each other's shoes through swapping their roles in the role-playing session.

It will not be too late to remedy the deplorable situation if Hong Kong  takes the initiative to follow other countries' successful examples from now on.

Queenie Au-Yeung, Aberdeen

On other matters...

In your December 6 article ('Crackdown on prostitutes leads to more men asking for sex: police'), we note that for only the second time this year a group of men in Yau Tsim have been arrested for 'soliciting for an immoral purpose'.

Are we really to believe that it is normally only the women who solicit?

Female sex workers have been regularly arrested for 'soliciting for an immoral purpose' for many years in Hong Kong.

We would be interested in the number of women arrested for sex offences  up to now  compared with that for men.

This year,  only 37 men have been arrested - in Yau Tsim, according to your article.

If sex is part of the human condition, why are we concerned about  soliciting? After all, prostitution itself is not illegal. And why are we victimising the women and not the men?

Moyreen Tilbrook and Jessica Bellas, HK Association of Business & Professional Women

Nothing highlights the truly appalling racism and miscarriage of justice like your recent report,  'Louis Vuitton thief jailed'.

A local man is jailed for nine weeks for stealing two Louis Vuitton T-shirts worth HK$8,300, and he has been released on bail pending an appeal.

Nine weeks for a Hong Kong man compared to six months for a foreign domestic helper?

Where is the justice in this? It reflects disgracefully on the Hong Kong legal system and Hong Kong society as a whole.

Charles Low, Mid-Levels



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