China parents victims as girls stolen to order

Li Xiang Xiang’s mother was expecting to see her back in minutes with a big smile and a bag of sweets. But when Xiang Xiang aged 2½, - whose rhyming name means “thoughtful” left home on April 1 to go to the shop around the corner, as she did every day, she never returned. Her heartbroken mother and father joined the ranks of Chinese parents who fear they have lost their little girls to child kidnappers.

Little boys have long been abducted for sale in China. But recently, the country’s strict birth control policy, which led families intent on having a boy to abort girls, has created a shortage of baby girls in the countryside. Some 124 boys are born for every 100 girls in China, and in one province, the figure has risen to 192, according to a report in the British Medical Journal. So stolen girls have therefore become valuable commodities. Many are bought by farmers who want wives for their small sons when they come of age or by men who want a child bride without a dowry.

Between 2,000 and 3,000 children and young women are kidnapped every year says the public security ministry. But state-controlled newspapers have put the figure as high as 20,000. Only a handful of cases are solved. “I can’t eat. My wife cries every night. Our son, who’s one, has been sick since his sister vanished and now he’s in hospital,” Xiang Xiang's father, Li Faming, 35, told The Sunday Times newspaper. He and his wife were allowed to have a second child because their first was a daughter.

Sadly, Faming’s story is typical. He makes just enough money as a decorator to survive in a slum district on the fringe of Kunming. The southwestern province is a centre of human trafficking that is spreading to Burma, Laos and Vietnam. The family made their own “missing” posters with a photograph of Xiang Xiang and plastered it around the district where, Li says, about 10 children have gone missing since March. Parents across China have defied the authorities’ repression of any mass campaign and 2,000 sets of parents signed up to a website whose name means “baby come home”.

Last month the public security ministry mounted its sixth campaign against the trade and issued a list of the country’s 10 most wanted human traffickers. It also launched a nation-wide DNA database to help identify missing children.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children