The police and parents of missing children across China are now tapping social media to find their kids who are often the victim of syndicates. One such victim was a three-year-old girl in Guangdong Province who was abducted by a woman by outwitting the tyke’s grandfather.
Fortunately, the girl has been recovered and is now back with her family. A screengrab from the CCTV video that helped find the child is now viral in Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, after it was released by the police and published by the microblogging site.
The child was walking with her grandfather when a woman approached them to ask for food. The old man gave in to her request, only to discover she took the girl while he was buying the woman something to eat. The grandfather said he wanted to jump into the river after he lost his granddaughter.
Among the comments of Weibo users who saw the screengrab was to use a hashtag that translates into English as “First ask for food, then kidnap granddaughter,” quoted BBC. Another proposed the death penalty for human traffickers who often are given 10-year prison sentences when caught.
It is difficult to estimate the number of Chinese children kidnapped, but it is safe to say it is a common thing in China. According to Daily Mail, up to 20,000 babies in China are victims of human trafficking annually. Last week, Chinese police investigated a big child trafficking ring in Sichuan Province and caught 78 suspect in a railway station on Monday, Jan. 18. In the process, they rescued 15 infants held by the gang that were abducted from Shandong Province.
The police report said they arrested 12 of the suspect in Liangshan and captured the 66 others in Shandong, 36 of whom have a household registration in that province. To help determine if the babies were kidnap victims and not related to the suspects, authorities took blood samples from all of them and had it tested.