IT'S A BALMY Saturday night in Tsim Sha Tsui and a crowd of young ravers is milling around outside a well-known nightclub. Inside the venue, several storeys up, thumping music fills the spaceship-like dance floor and bar area.
It's an unusual setting for a table laden with information leaflets and blood-pressure gauges. But the set-up serves as a booth for the Play Safe Project, an initiative by the Caritas social agency to provide support and guidance for young people frequenting the city's clubs, especially troubled teenagers who might be drawn into a dangerous whirl of sex and drugs.
Operating like a mobile sex-education unit, the table is typically set up at midnight by two social workers and a young volunteer who man it until 5.30am. There, young clubbers can sit down for a quick health check - and a chat with one of the team.
On a typical night, up to 80 people will drop by to talk, says Sparkle Yu Kai-ming, a social worker who has been involved in the project for the past three years.
Outreach units set up in clubbing areas in Mong Kok regularly see teenagers as young as 13 wandering the streets late at night. Often they're already sexually active, he says.
'These kids come from broken homes,' Yu says. 'They drop out of school early, sleep all day and go to discos at night. They've never received adequate sex education and, as a result, don't know how to protect themselves from having to deal with things like STDs [sexually transmitted disease] and abortion.'
