NEW DELHI — Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India.
They are boys like Irfan, drugged and abducted at the age of 9 by two men on a motorbike as he walked home one day after playing with friends.
Read full article >>
Showing posts with label Child Abduction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Child Abduction. Show all posts
Sunday, September 23, 2012
India slowly confronts epidemic of missing children
India slowly confronts epidemic of missing children:
NEW DELHI — Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India.
They are boys like Irfan, drugged and abducted at the age of 9 by two men on a motorbike as he walked home one day after playing with friends.
Read full article >>
NEW DELHI — Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India.
They are boys like Irfan, drugged and abducted at the age of 9 by two men on a motorbike as he walked home one day after playing with friends.
Read full article >>
Monday, March 12, 2012
Over 24,000 women, children freed in human-trafficking crackdown - The Irish Times - Mon, Mar 12, 2012
Over 24,000 women, children freed in human-trafficking crackdown - The Irish Times - Mon, Mar 12, 2012
SOURCE: The Irish TimesMonday, March 12, 2012
SOURCE: The Irish TimesMonday, March 12, 2012
CLIFFORD COONAN in Beijing
POLICE IN China rescued over 24,000 kidnapped women and children nationwide last year, the country’s public security ministry told the annual parliament, the National People’s Congress, in an ongoing crackdown on human trafficking.
In all, police rescued 8,660 abducted children and 15,458 women in busts of 3,195 human trafficking gangs during 2011, the ministry said.
Girls who are kidnapped are often sold into prostitution and in one high-profile case last year, the police busted a gang that was trafficking women to Angola. In the raid, 19 women were rescued and 16 suspects were apprehended.
Human trafficking is a major problem in China, as the traditional preference for boys over girls, especially in rural areas, and the one-child policy of population control, has seen a rise in the number of boys kidnapped and sold, often to childless couples.
Girls and women also are abducted and used as labourers or as brides for unwed sons, because the one-child policy has seen a massive discrepancy in the birth ratio between the number of boys and girls.
In July last year, 89 children were rescued when police busted two major human-trafficking rings in south China, and the suspects were mostly Vietnamese, smuggling children from Vietnam into China.
The ministry also cited the ministry’s work in helping reunite children with their families, using new technology such as a DNA database for missing children.
The ministry has also opened up a Weibo microblog account to help gather intelligence on missing persons cases.
“The ministry reaffirmed its tough stance on trafficking and vowed sterner crackdowns against such crimes,” Xinhua News Agency said.
The ministry did not give any figures for the total number of women and children abducted last year.
Abductions and human trafficking have become serious public concerns after a string of revelations in past years, including a shocking 2007 scandal in which thousands were forced into slave labour in brickyards and mines across the nation.
The latest big case was on Friday, when police rescued 77 children and arrested 310 suspects after busting four child-trafficking rings, where gangs were buying infants in poor rural areas and selling them to big cities.
More than 7,000 police officers from 14 provinces, including Shandong, Guizhou, Henan, Shanxi, Yunnan and Guangxi, took part in a joint operation.
Monday, March 8, 2010
BERNAMA - Chinese Women Taught To Avoid Human Traffickers
Image via Wikipedia
GUIYANG, March 8 (Bernama) -- Rural women in southwest China's Guizhou Province are asked to yell, scream and find a crowd if they ever face abduction by human traffickers, reports Xinhua news agency on Monday.
Human trafficking in China is a serious and long-term issue. The problem is particularly serious in rural areas. In Guizhou, women were abducted and sold as cheap or slave labour.
The province also holding classes in March to teach hundreds of rural women on how to protect themselves from the region's increasing trafficking problem.
According to Xinhua's report on Monday, the courses teach women that when they are abducted, they should try to find a crowd and call for help, and also try to create conversation with the abducters to get more information on locations and prospective buyers.
Wu Kunfeng, chairperson of the provincial Women's Federation also reminded these women not to forego any chances that can lead them to contact the police, and always try to write notes to tell people of their situation.
"We always tell them (rural women) that they should never give up hope of rescue or escape," Wu said.
However, Wu said the classes did not include a self-defence course, as organizers feared that women who put up a physical fight could be injured or killed.
"We've found that many women were abducted, while out looking for jobs. They were not educated and were vulnerable to criminals," said Wu.
"So we've realized that not only should we act to combat the increasing social problem, but also teach more people to better protect themselves," Wu said.
Greater efforts were needed in China to fight trafficking of women and children, as the crime "grossly violates human rights", said China's police chief Meng Jianzhu on March 1. Meng urged local governments to address economic and social problems that could be at the root of rampant human trafficking, such as poverty and unemployment among women, inadequate education of children of migrant workers in cities, and illegal use of child labourers.
The Public Security Ministry launched a crackdown on child abduction and trafficking in April 2009.
As of Oct 12, more than 2,000 children had been rescued from more than 1,700 human trafficking cases.
-- BERNAMA
BERNAMA - Chinese Women Taught To Avoid Human Traffickers
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Sunday, November 29, 2009
On the hunt for China's child snatchers
Image by Planet Love via Flickr
But as the BBC's Damian Grammaticas reports from Beijing, many thousands of children are being snatched off the streets to be sold every year and most are never recovered.
The footage from the CCTV security camera is soft and blurred, but a man can be seen walking down a street carrying a child away in the night.
He glances over his shoulder, wary. This is a child kidnapper in the act of committing his crime.
The man has snatched the boy off the street in Dongguan in southern China where he was playing.
Another camera films the abductor as he gets tired, pauses, puts the boy down, then picks him up and sets off again.
His air is unhurried. There are many passersby, but nobody questions him.
There are thousands of cases like this in China every year - children, often boys, stolen to be sold for profit.
Detective work
In another case a camera mounted in a bus station catches a man luring a boy into his trap.
The man is sitting, holding a baby turtle in his hand.
A young boy comes up to him, his sister by his side, to look at the animal. But it is the boy, three-and-a-half-year-old Luo Run, who is the target, not the girl.
He was abducted and spirited hundreds of miles away by a gang of traffickers.
In Luo Run's case the police were able to identify the man who snatched him.
Trailing the gang took them to the mountains of southern Fujian province.
There, posing as buyers looking for a child, detectives arranged a meeting with the so-called snakehead, the gangster who had sold the boy on.
The demand for children is driven by a deep-seated preference in southern China for sons, boys to keep the family name alive who have a duty to care for aged parents.
And some parents are prepared to buy a stolen child if they can not have a boy of their own.
It is thought China's One Child Policy exacerbates the problem. Couples the law applies to who have a girl first cannot then legally have another child, so many turn to the traffickers to procure a boy.
Arresting the snakehead who had sold Luo Run led detectives to trace and free not only him, but also more than a dozen children, all of whom had been stolen and traded to families in the area.
The children were all taken back to Guangdong province where they had come from and were reunited with their parents.
Abductions rising
Luo Run's parents are poor migrant labourers who live in a tiny flat in a workers' block in Guangzhou.
They say their son ended up with a well-off elderly couple who were desperate for a son of their own and showered the boy with toys. When he was rescued it took him days to accept his real parents again. Now they never let him out of their sight.
"When my son went missing, it was like my heart was being cut into pieces. It was the darkest time of my life, words cannot describe it," Luo Run's father Luo An Xin says.
"When my son came back, everything suddenly became clear, and it filled my heart with joy."
Happy as it is, Luo Run's rescue is an exception.
Nobody knows how many children are being kidnapped every year. But parents say it is thousands, and most are never recovered.
Even China's Supreme People's Court has said the numbers of stolen children are rising.
This week it sentenced two men to death for kidnapping and trading 15 children. It may be a sign that China's government wants to send a signal that it is cracking down on the trade.
Desperate search
On the streets of southern China's teeming factory towns the children of migrant labourers, playing unsupervised, are easy prey for the traffickers.
Two thousand stolen children have been recovered by Chinese police in a special operation launched this year, but often China's authorities can be callous in their response to the problem.
Some parents say local officials often do not want to deal with cases of stolen children. They say they have been warned to keep quiet and not campaign publicly to find their children lest they disturb social order.
Peng Gaofeng's two-year-old son Le Le was abducted right outside his shop. Le Le was a cheeky, vivacious boy, doted on by his parents.
Security camera footage shows a man walking away holding the boy. But it is too blurred to show the face of the man.
Peng Gaofeng agrees to meet us, but only discreetly in a local restaurant.
He has travelled across southern China looking for his son. He has put up posters and been on television.
But since he began his public campaign to find Le Le and other children, he says he has been monitored by police and warned against making too much fuss.
"If there were just one or two cases it would be a minor thing for the police. But there are thousands of us who've lost our kids. It's a massive issue," Peng Gaofeng says.
"By campaigning openly we undermine the image the government wants to project that this is a harmonious society."
For some officials finding Peng Gaofeng's child appears less important than preserving the facade of order.
So all he has now are some pictures of his son, and the security camera footage showing Le Le, vanishing into the night.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8383424.stm
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