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 | Friday, April 21, 2000, updated at 11:33(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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China Cracks Down on Abduction of Women, KidsChinese authorities launched a nationwide campaign against the abduction of women and children April 1 and signaled its seriousness last week by executing a Fujian province man for selling at least 27 women and children.It is report that 7,660 women were abducted into forced marriages and servitude in China last year. But, experts estimate that more than a million Chinese women and children have been abducted in the past decade. Most of the women who are abducted and sold are from poor, rural areas, As "brides,'' they spend their days doing chores and bearing children, often locked in their owners' houses. Some are sold into prostitution. The buyers are mostly lonely, older men in other poor, rural areas who spend their life savings -- typically $250 to $400 -- to purchase a woman. Sometimes they cut the women's Achilles' tendons to keep them from running away. Marriageable women are scarce in rural China because many women have fled to the booming coastal cities to seek work. Nationwide, men outnumber women because many Chinese girls are drowned at birth by parents who want sons to care for them in old age, not daughters who will marry and move away. Not all abducted women are sold into marriage. Many end up in brothels, karaoke bars and dance halls, working as prostitutes under conditions that often are as controlled as those of the slave-wives in the countryside. Abducted children, almost all of them male, typically are sold to Chinese couples who want sons to earn money and take care of them in their old age. Many abducted women and children simply disappear. Some women, even when they are rescued, choose to stay with their purchasers, especially if they have borne them children. Others, like Huang, return to their homes.
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