A five-year-old boy who died with his mother when she committed suicide by burning charcoal could have been saved if social workers had intervened earlier, a single parents' welfare group said yesterday.
The Hong Kong Single Parents' Association said Lai Man-kei should have been taken away from his mother, Lai Shuk-chun, 42, an habitual gambler, and placed in care.
At the time of the incident, the two had been on welfare and were visited by government social workers every month. Their bodies were found in their Yuen Long flat on Monday.
The association's chief executive, Jessie Yu Sau-chu, said the Social Welfare Department could have sought approval from the mother or requested a court order to put her son in care.
'We might not have been able to stop the mother from gambling, but at least, if she was really addicted, the boy could have been placed somewhere else for care,' she said, adding that according to welfare policies, single parents were not required to seek work if they had children younger than 15 years old.
She warned of the danger facing single parents, who might be tempted to go to extremes, as had happened with Lai who had been free to spend her welfare money on gambling.