China Cracks Down on Child Kidnappings
Chinese police say they have rescued 89 abducted children and arrested 369 people involved in human trafficking, in an apparent effort to calm public displeasure at the failure of government to stem a rising tide of child kidnappings.
Beijing launched a widely publicised crackdown on child trafficking earlier this year, after a microblog campaign urged residents to photograph street children so their parents could identify kidnapped children. The campaign demonstrated widespread outrage among citizens who criticised government for ignoring – or even hindering – efforts of parents to find abducted children.
China’s Ministry of Public Security said on Wednesday that the latest arrests were made in connection with a six-month operation to break up a pair of “large criminal enterprises” involved in child-trafficking across 14 provinces.
“Two large criminal gangs involved in child-trafficking have been successfully destroyed, once again showing the public security organs’ solemn commitment to the people,” it said, noting that abducted children were sold for an average of about Rmb40,000 ($6,210) each.
State media said that some of the rescued infants were abducted from Vietnam, by Vietnamese residents, and sold in southern China. In another case earlier this month, police rescued eight infants, aged 10 days to seven months, who had been drugged with sleeping pills, state media said.
Abductions and human trafficking have become an increasing focus of public dissatisfaction against the government in recent years. Many such abductions involve infant or toddler girls kidnapped to serve as “child brides” – babies sold to families desperate for daughters-in-law, in a culture acutely short of marriage-aged women. The infants are raised within the family, then forced to marry a “brother” when they are older.
Trafficking in child brides has grown dramatically in recent years, demographers say – a sign of the high price that China has begun to pay for its gender imbalance, which has been exacerbated by its one child policy. Chinese families traditionally preferred boys, for cultural and economic reasons. Though that preference is waning, China’s last census showed a surplus of 34m men.
According to state media, the government estimates that up to 20,000 children are trafficked every year. “Child abductions have entered a phase of high frequency,” Chen Shiqu, head of the anti-human-trafficking office at the Ministry of Public Security, said in a television interview posted on his blog earlier this year.
Since April 2009, police say they have rescued 14,000 trafficked children. But many parents complain that local police refuse to register children as missing and are sometimes reluctant to follow leads offered by parents.
