China Women, Children Face Growing Trafficking
Risk
04 Apr 2007
Source: Reuters
By Lindsay Beck
BEIJING, April 4 (Reuters) - Women and children in China face a growing
threat of being trafficked and sold into marriage or sex work, as labour
migration and a widening gender imbalance put them at risk, an international aid
group said on Wednesday.
About 119 boys are born in China for every 100 girls, an imbalance that
has grown since Beijing introduced a one-child policy more than 25 years ago
that has bolstered a traditional preference for boys, resulting in abortions of
female foetuses and abandonment of baby girls.
"Lack of girls for marriage in the eastern and rural areas is fuelling a
demand for girl babies to be raised as future brides for better-off farmers'
sons," Kate Wedgwood, China country director for Save the Children, told the
Foreign Correspondents' Club.
The strict family-planning policy means China will be home to 30 million
more men of marriageable age than women by 2020, state media has reported.
Wedgwood said it also meant many poor, rural families were reluctant to
register children born outside of the plan, leaving them vulnerable to
trafficking or exploitation by local officials who encourage them to hand over
their babies in return for being excused a fine.
Migration for employment was also leaving many vulnerable to traffickers,
both rural workers who move across the country to huge urban centres, and
children who are left behind, often without adequate care.
"The number of women and children from poor and underdeveloped regions
who migrate due to employment and or business considerations, but end up being
abducted or trafficked, will continue to grow," Wang Jinling, a researcher at
the Zhejiang Academy of Social Sciences, said in a paper.
"Some of them will be sold and married, and some will be forced to become
offenders, such as sex workers and drug traffickers," Wang wrote.
Wedgwood said her organisation was working with the government on
projects in rural border areas to register job recruiters to ensure their
legitimacy and to make "safe migration classes" mandatory for villagers seeking
work in urban areas.
A lack of reliable figures made it nearly impossible to track trends in
trafficking, she added.
The Ministry of Public Security recorded 2,500 cases of trafficking in
China in 2006, but that figure only includes resolved cases, rather than those
reported, and fails to make clear whether "cases" involve individuals or rings.
But Chinese media regularly report on abduction rings.
One report cited police in the southern city of Dongguan -- a major
manufacturing hubs and home to millions of migrant factory workers -- as saying
baby boys in the area could be sold for 10- 20,000 yuan ($1,250-$2,500), and
girls for a few
thousand.