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Rising Incidences of Child Trafficking in China

Rural Chinese children increasingly risk being sold or forced to become beggars, petty thieves or sex workers as their farmer parents flock to cities looking for work, an international rights group said yesterday.

China has a thriving black market in girls and women sold as brides, and in babies who are abducted or bought from poor families for sale to couples wanting children. The government says that it has cracked down harshly on such cases and that the trend is decreasing.

But Kate Wedgwood, Save the Children's country director for China and North Korea, said that there were no reliable figures for the number of children being trafficked and that the continuing migration from farms to cities is sure to make the problem worse.

"We already know the risks [of child trafficking] are exacerbated by migration, so I think the likelihood is that it will increase," she said. In recent years, an estimated 150 million to 200 million people have moved from the Chinese countryside to urban areas, where their labor at factories and construction sites has fueled breakneck economic growth.

Several hundred million more are expected to leave China's vast rural hinterland in the next 15 to 20 years. Wedgwood said poor rural children from ethnic communities are the most at risk because they have limited command of Mandarin Chinese and often do not know their rights.

Children who are disabled or have HIV/AIDS also face increased risk of being trafficked and are sometimes forced into panhandling, Wedgwood said. She estimated that tens of thousands of boys from Xinjiang have been bought or kidnapped by gangs, who force them into pickpocketing and other nonviolent crime in China's eastern cities.

Ethnic minority girls from Yunnan Province and the Guangxi region in the south risk being forced into the sex trade in China and nearby Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and Malaysia, Wedgwood said. Children left behind in villages are vulnerable because they are often looked after by grandparents -- who often need care themselves -- or by institutions that lose track of the children.

However, those who migrate with their parents are also in danger because they are thrust into unfamiliar surroundings with limited social services, and their parents are often busy working. Wedgwood wants China to redefine child trafficking to include victims up to 18 years of age and children forced into work to pay off family debts.

China currently defines child trafficking victims as children up to age 14 old who are sold or kidnapped.

Save the Children is based in the UK.

Adapted from: "Human rights group points to rising incidence of child trafficking in China." Taipei Times. 5 April 2007.