Children left at home by working parents suffer abuse: survey

Some 90 percent of Chinese children left back home by their parents suffer from psychological violence and 14 percent suffer simultaneously from a combination of neglect and physical, mental and sexual abuse, according to an annual survey published by a Beijing NGO.

The shocking findings are based on analysis of “2,763 pieces of verified data” collected in 2019 from East China’s Jiangxi and Anhui provinces and Southwest China’s Yunnan Province by On the Road to School, a Beijing nonprofit organization and public welfare promotion center, which released a paper on these children’s mental health for a consecutive fifth year.

More than 91 percent of the surveyed children, whose parents had to work in other places, suffered mental abuse, 65 percent physical abuse, 31 percent sexual abuse and 41 percent were neglected. Some 14 percent suffered all four simultaneously.

Children left behind in urban areas suffered worse violence than their rural peers.

“There are many left-behind children in the cities who are both migrant children and leftbehind children, who lack the care from either parents or grandparents,” said Chen Yuanyuan, a professor at the school of economics in Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

Home and school are the two locations where children tend to suffer physical and emotional abuse, the paper said.

Researchers found physical abuse mainly occurs at school, which includes bullying and punishment from teachers as well as bullying between students.

Emotional abuse occurred mainly in families, such as verbal abuse and discrimination, with the incidence at 86 percent, the paper said.

All research suggests that being subjected to violence impairs a child’s psychological development.

A child’s self-esteem, resilience, emotional strength and social ability all decrease after violence, the paper noted.

A worrying 30.6 percent of the left-behind children suffered sexual abuse, indicating they were more likely to suffer sexual assaults.

The physical and emotional violence that children suffer stems partly from traditional Chinese concepts of raising them, Chen noted.

“Schools and parents tend to resort to outof-date parenting methods including corporal punishment and verbal abuse when they educate children, which leads to the situation that children left behind in villages suffer more often from such abuses,” Chen told the Global Times.