Policewomen Josephine Lau, Jerry Ma and Rita Hung agree that working as a cop in Hong Kong is not as easy as they thought.
Doing frontline policing in a city like Hong Kong is vastly different from working a 9-to-5 regime in an office, and such is the life of most of the 3,500 policewomen of the 28,000-strong force.
Most of the women in uniform are married and have at least one child and are between 25 and 35 years old.
OffBeat, an internal staff newspaper of the Hong Kong Police Force, interviewed three officers who accepted the challenge to carry on policing and asked them about their experiences.
Josephine Lau is with the force's Crime Wing and has a 9-month-old daughter, Szechit; Jerry Ma is with the Hong Kong Island Missing Persons Unit and has a 7-year-old boy, Jeffery; and Rita Hung is a Road Safety Officer with Hong Kong Island Traffic and has a 5-month-old daughter, Celia.
All three admitted to a nagging sense of guilt at leaving the mothering of their babies to someone else.
"Policing, particularly frontline policing, has its own inherent stresses which, in the interests of the officer and the public, must be efficiently and effectively managed," said Hung. "But work itself is not the sole source of stress for us."
The secret of success is enlisting the help of parents or siblings to baby-sit while you are on duty, and if no relative is available to do it full-time, you might need a domestic helper, she said.
Jerry Ma is more lucky because, when her son Jeffery was young, her mother-in-law lived nearby and cared for him.
"Though my parents continued to visit, we had to hire a domestic helper," Ma said.
"I am happy to say that we managed to get him into a prominent primary school partly, I think, because he also learned some basic English from the helper," she said.
Josephine Lau's sister was able to help out for a few months but she is now in the process of hiring help.
Rita Hung said that she had no choice but to employ a helper right from the beginning and hoped that doing so would help with the child's English.
She emphasized that it was also essential to have the support of capable, caring and helpful husbands, adding that this is usually the case when the husband is also a policeman.
Some husbands, however, find it difficult to completely hide their feeling deep down that they are not quite happy about spending so much time alone with their child without the presence of the mother.
(eastday.com October 29, 2002)
