Lost Boys: Chinese Parents Don?t Want Trafficked Babies Back

Thursday, September 5, 2013 | By: Elizabeth Culliford

When police in China?s southeast Jiangsu province broke up a child-trafficking ring in August, they rescued 10 babies recently taken by the gang. But there was to be no happy reunion of the lost children with their families. The reason? The parents didn?t want them back.

TIME reports that ?all 10 of the rescued came from Liangshan, a hardscrabble region in the mountains of southwest China?s Sichuan province, where the average annual income is less than $400 per year.?

It has emerged that the infants were not kidnapped by traffickers, but were in fact sold to the gang by their parents. Not only is the price that traffickers will pay for a healthy child more than 10 times the average annual income, but all of the trafficked children were bought from couples who already had children.

According to authorities, not one of the birth parents came forward to claim their children, perhaps for fear of having to surrender their money from the traffickers or being made to face the fines for having more than three children.

TIME reports that in 2012 almost $400 million of the $2 billion in Social Support Payments came from the Sichuan province alone. For these subsistence farmers, the cost of these Social Support fines could be the equivalent of between two and ten years? income.

One officer called Yu Shaobin told the Beijing Youth Daily that the children he saw in Liangshan were like stock animals, playing naked in the dirt. He explained: ?For these families, one less child is one less burden.?

The traffickers have admitted to buying children, particularly boys, from poor areas of Sichuan and selling them on for twice that price to wealthier couples who cannot conceive.

And, in a strange anti-climax to a child trafficking case, it is with these families that the children will have to stay.

The Epoch Times reports that social welfare homes have refused to take the trafficked babies because they can only claim financial support for orphans and abandoned children.

Hou Qiquang, a spokesman for the Xuzhou railway police told China Daily that with one exception, the police have been forced to leave the babies with their buyers. Only one child is now in a welfare home as police have been unable to reach the adopted parents.

Another officer told the Beijing Youth Daily: ?These children have nowhere to go and can only stay with their adopting families. It seems they are better off there than with their birth families or the welfare houses. This is most embarrassing.?

Bu Zhang Baoyan, the founder of Baby Back Home, a website that posts information about missing children, has called for parents who have sold their children to be deprived of their custody rights. She told China Daily that such parents are not suitable as guardians and that there may be instances where children are returned only to be sold again.

Similarly, Yu Shenghua, director of criminal cases at the Yingke Law Firm in Beijing was quoted as saying that parents should also ?bear the legal liability of abandonment and human trafficking, although we?re sympathetic with regard to their living conditions, which prompt them to make money by selling children.?

He also called for the families who purchase to children to be given stiff penalties to act as a deterrent.

?

Image courtesy of ToGa Wanderings

You might also like:

Source: http://www.theworldofchinese.com/2013/09/lost-boys-chinese-parents-dont-want-trafficked-babies-back/

rosario dawson keith olbermann gsa andrew bynum the time machine michelin tires michelin tires