Missing kids’ parents battle cops, criminals
BEIJING — In the grainy video, Zhang Xiuhong can see her daughter ride her bike down a country road on her way to school one spring afternoon six years ago.
In the next shot, Yao Li rides down a driveway a few moments after her classmates walk by. Then, the pictures stop: The 15-year-old disappeared just minutes after that surveillance footage was taken, leaving only a shoe in a nearby ditch.
Zhang and her husband have since searched all over China for Yao Li, hoping to rescue her from a child trafficking industry that swallows up thousands of boys and girls every year. Along the way, the couple have also been harassed, arrested and jailed repeatedly by police who accuse them of stirring up trouble by joining with other parents and taking their search to the streets.
Doing own searches
“We go out and search, and then all these police surround us,” Zhang said in the dingy room she and her husband share near where her daughter was last seen. “Nobody’s watching for my daughter. Nobody’s doing anything. How can we have any more hope?”
In a tightly monitored society where authorities detain even relatives of air crash victims demanding government action, Zhang and other parents of missing children have learned that they must fight on two fronts.
First, they’re up against a sprawling, opaque network of abductors and illegal buyers and sellers of children. And since police efforts to find children often leave parents unsatisfied, they must negotiate with authorities to search on their own.
As many as 70,000 children are estimated to be kidnapped every year in China for illegal adoption, forced labor or sex trafficking, making it one of the world’s biggest markets for abducted children, according to the state-run newspaper China Daily. By comparison, in the U.S., about 100 children are abducted annually by people who are strangers to them, said the Polly Klaas Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing crimes against children.
According to Pia Macrae, China director for the international nonprofit group Save the Children, Chinese police are often more willing to help families with greater means, and even then frequently don’t tell parents what they’re doing.
“The parents feel uncommunicated to and want to take actions,” Macrae said. “We have seen a real effort to reach out from the police to improve things and we hope it will get better.”
While China has strengthened laws against trafficking and raised more public awareness of the issue, several parents said they were operating on their own.
In fact, they said police harassment usually started when they gathered in groups of more than 20 wearing poster boards and handing out flyers with pictures of their children. Xiao said police have also stopped him when he drives his van pasted with photos of missing children.
Maintaining hope
Chinese police regularly crack down on any groups they perceive to be organizing without government approval and threatening official authority, no matter the cause.
The parents of missing children, however, refuse to give up.
About 1,000 families have formed a support group that shares leads about missing children and negotiates with police to allow parents to search for their children.
“I’ve dedicated myself to finding him,” said Xiao Chaohua of his son, who was 5 when he disappeared in 2007. “If I stop, I can’t do anything because I’ll be thinking of him.”