China’s Missing Children

“As many as 70,000 Chinese kids may get kidnapped each year. Parents, who often have nowhere to turn to for help, are taking matters into their own hands.”

The entire article is a must-read to understand how long trafficking has been going on and that the child “sales” are not just for slave labor or prostitution, but for adoption. We have excerpted sections below.

“Since at least the 1980s, kidnapping and human trafficking have become a problem in China, and most often, the victims are children. Estimates vary on just how bad things have gotten. The Chinese government reports that fewer than 10,000 children are kidnapped each year, but the U.S. State Department says it’s closer to 20,000. Some independent estimates put the number as high as 70,000 (compared with 100 to 200 children kidnapped per year in the United States, for example).

The vast majority of kidnapped children will never see their families again. In China, kids are abducted not for ransom but for sale. Often, they come from poor and rural families — the families least likely to be capable of tracking their kids down or fighting back. Some children are then sold to new “adoptive” families looking for children. Others are sold into slave labor, prostitution, or a life on the streets. In some cases, healthy children are brutally crippled by handlers on the theory that a child with broken legs or horrific boils looks sadder and can earn more money begging on the street.

Some children are even sold into adoption overseas. Chinese adoption agencies seeking the substantial donations foreign parents make when they adopt — in some cases, as much as $5,000 — have been known to purchase children from human traffickers, though these cases appear to be relatively rare. ”

No study has been done on how many have been trafficked for overseas adoption, so the author’s contention that it is “rare” has no data to back that assertion up.

“Large, National, and Highly Organized” Kidnappings

“Most instances of kidnapping are perpetrated by gangs that are large, national, and highly organized. Based on cases solved by Chinese police, it’s not uncommon for some kidnapping rings to have dozens or even hundreds of members, and to be responsible for the kidnappings of hundreds of children. ”

Poor Statistics

“The estimates vary so widely because official numbers are hard to come by and harder to trust. Pi Yijun, a professor at the Institute for Criminal Justice and an expert on crimes involving children, says, “Data about the dark side of society is extremely difficult to obtain, and even when it is made public, the Public Security Bureau [i.e., the police] only reports based on the number of cases they’ve uncovered.” That means that China’s official statistics on kidnapping are based only on cases that are proved to be crimes. Because most parents have no proof that their child was kidnapped (rather than running away on his or her own), many cases are filed as missing-person reports and thus go uncounted in official statistics.”

Difficulties in Tracing Kids

“Even when police do investigate seriously, happy endings are rare. Trafficking gangs are highly organized. Children are moved over great distances and shuffled between handlers after they’re kidnapped to ensure they are impossible to trace. ”

How Families Are Trying to Locate Their Kids and How Much They Want Them Back

“An entire ecosystem of Internet services has sprung up for Chinese parents like Liu. Sites like “Baby Come Home” collect information, photos, and other data from tens of thousands of parents and help them publicize it all. They also collect photos and reports of street children for parents of kidnapped kids to browse, looking for their children.

Many parents also take to the street. Mr. Liu connected online with other parents of kidnapped children in his area, and now they organize events together. One of the parents, whose son was also kidnapped, has decorated his truck with photos of his son and dozens of other missing children. The parents pick a busy street corner, park the truck there, surround it with large posters about their children, and hand out fliers and cards to passers-by.

When he can, Liu brings his young daughter along to these events, where she helps her parents pass out flyers. She’s too young to understand what happened to her little brother, but she hasn’t forgotten him. She dreams about him, her father says. “When we hear her talk about him, it’s devastating.”

“Of course, without buyers there would be no sellers, and there are still buyers aplenty… ”

Obvious That Kids Were Trafficked But Culture of Silence

“After Li Yong was kidnapped and sold to his new family in Jiangsu, he walked around telling neighbors his original name and asking to go home, speaking in a dialect foreign to that province. But no one reported anything to the authorities until more than a decade later, and by then, it was way too late. ”

Parents of kidnapped child: “”If we can’t find our child, life is meaningless.”

China’s Missing Children
[Foreign Policy 10/10/11 by Charles Custer]

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