- Joined
- Oct 29, 2002
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- 36,481
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- East of Suez
I just heard a bit of lore first-hand. As I posted on another thread, stolen children being forced to work as beggars is a large-scale problem in China. I was just talking to a colleague of mine here in Hong Kong who has a two year old son, she won't go to mainland China with him because she fears for his safety. Helicopter parenting is the norm in Hong Kong but perhaps her concerns are legitimate.
Anyway, she told me a story about how she was in a park (in Hong Kong) and a woman approached her and started asking her questions about her son. She (the mother) ran away, because she was afraid that the woman might be a child-thief who had a knock-out chemical on her skin or a spray of some kind that she could use to incapacitate her (the parent) while making off with her son. To me this is classic UL stuff (she also told me a FOAF about someone getting their kidneys stolen in Shenzhen after going to the toilet alone, which is a common story in Hong Kong) but there are stories all over the world of people using mysterious knock-out chemicals to perpetrate robbings, rapes etc (see stories about scopolamine use in Colombia, etc), so who knows?
Although I have never met the family myself, friends of my wife's friend had their four-year-old daughter kidnapped in China while on holiday with her grandmother. If that sounds like a tenuous link, I can assure you this is not an urban myth. She was taken when the grandmother went to the lavatory and police believe they were probably being followed for some time. I do have a few more details (not many), but I won't be posting them.
This occurred last year and despite consulate assistance and a police investigation no lead or information has ever arisen and the family assume she is dead. I didn't say as much, but perhaps this is a coping strategy as it may be better than some of the alternatives. Kidnapping statistics in China look high because the huge population means that even infrequent phenomena are multiplied up, but the abduction of children is still a major issue in China: the figures I've read suggest anywhere between 20,000 and 200,000 are taken annually (no figure is reliable). The popular narrative is that regular Chinese people have learnt over the last century or so that it never pays to put your head over the parapet and will turn away and ignore even blatantly suspicious or criminal behaviour in public rather that risk getting involved. I don't have enough experience of China to confirm or deny this thesis, although it does remind me of the cases where drivers who have knocked down cyclists or pedestrians then try to kill their victims as the law requires the guilty party to pay potentially-lifelong medical expenses to his victim (I hope I'm getting that right): great pressures on malleable materials bring about grotesque forms.
Edit: just had a Google. The kidnapping hasn't been reported in any English-language media.
Edit2: wife has just corrected me, she was six, not four.
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