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Chinese police crack down on a
human trafficking gang in southwest China's Guizhou Province whilst sending
those abducted kids back home. [Xinhua]
China's first App for finding missing children, Ruijie
Xunzi, was launched on July 14, with the aim to help crack down on child
abduction and trafficking across the country.
Ruijie Xunzi serves as the
pioneering online system nationwide equipped with a national information database
for missing kids as well as biological information. The two databases
contain all the basic information of the lost children, regarding facial
features, voice, fingerprints, pupils and DNA information.
Li
Jie, the founder of Ruijie Xunzi, said that he drew his inspiration from
United States' practices, particularly in three globally-noted children abduction alert
systems.
Statistics
showed that in the U.S. 97.7 percent of missing kids could have been
returned home by relying on the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, Code Adam and AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcasting Emergency
Response) Alert systems. However, the rate is far from low in China.
How
to Operate?
According
to organizers, the online platform will publish online the information that
has been provided by guardians or collected and stored by the main database
on missing children. In the near future, more and more social networking
platforms will be integrated into the system for further spreading of
information.
In
addition, the platform will also apply facial recognition technology into
screening missing kid's photos uploaded by netizens for fast research.
Therefore, the information can be analyzed by police and guardians and
compared to information stored in the database before. Moreover, big data
analysis will dig deeper to further help find individuals.
The
platform shares a commonality with Code Adam in it they will cooperate with
department stores, retail shops, shopping malls, and supermarkets which are
often believed to the first places children can easily get lost.
Driving
Force
Last
year, an eye-opening feature film, "Dearest," starring Chinese
actress Zhao Wei, sparked a national
stir in light of its theme on child kidnapping. Earlier this year, a
Chinese-Hong Kong based blockbuster titled "Lost And Love" caught
the nation's attention again because it plunged into China's widespread
child-abduction problem.
Figures
released by the Chinese government revealed that almost 10,000 Chinese
children are lost or kidnapped every year, but data collected and
publicized by the social organizations indicated the situation was much
worse than it appeared with numbers rising seven-fold the official's yearly
numbers.
The
two movies, together with statistics released before the past 28th
anniversary of the International Day against Drug Abuse and
Illicit Trafficking in June, caused a sensation throughout the
country.
More
and more people are joining the ranks to fight against kidnapping and human
trafficking. Some social activists even asked the procuratorates and
lawmakers to give heavier punishments or even death sentences to all child
traffickers on Chinese social media because they thought greater punishment
might be part of the way to address the deep-rooted problem around the
world.
However,
many legal professors implied it would make no difference to the matter
after the accident or tragedy.
"Prevention
comes first, and active and effective measures should be taken for a quick
reaction," said a law professor.
Different
from demanding the death penalty, Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu
Province, witnessed its first child abduction alert system kick-start in
selected buildings locally in June. Pressing the emergency button, the
system will be initiated with all the exits of a building closed for 10
minutes to search for lost kids.
Foreign
Practices
In
fact, the Code Adam safety program was launched in the U.S. and Canada, and
was named after a 6 year-old boy Adam Walsh. The scheme was originally
created by Wal-Mart retail stores in 1994.
Developed
from the Code Adam system, the UK launched its version of Child Rescue
Alert in 1990s. Since 2005, the police in UK have enhanced its system and
issued to the press and media via email and text message when a child has
disappeared. The alert can be triggered on condition that the children must
be under 18 and are in imminent danger based on police or guardians'
"reasonable belief."
Some
have linked the decrease in abductions or disappearances of minors in
recent years to when the alert mechanism was launched.
Nowadays,
China embarks on its new journey to fight against child abduction and try
to help every parent step out of the worst nightmare.
China's first App
for finding missing children, Ruijie Xunzi,
was launched on July 14, with the aim to help crack down on child abduction and
trafficking across the country.
Ruijie Xunzi
serves as the pioneering online system nationwide equipped with a national
information database for missing kids as well as biological information. The
two databases contain all the basic information of the lost children, regarding
facial features, voice, fingerprints, pupils and DNA information.
Li Jie, the
founder of Ruijie Xunzi, said that he drew his inspiration from United States'
practices, particularly in three globally-noted children abduction alert systems
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