BEIJING - Chinese police rescued more than 24,000 abducted children
and women last year, some of whom had been sold for adoption or forced into
prostitution as far away as Angola, officials said Sunday.
Trafficking of women and children is a serious problem in China -
blamed in part on the strict "one-child" policy, which has put a
premium on baby boys - and activists say the cases uncovered by police are just
the tip of the iceberg.
The Ministry of Public Security said in a report posted on its website
that police across the country had rescued 8,660 children and 15,458 women in
2011 - all victims of trafficking.
The ministry added that authorities had cracked nearly 3,200
trafficking gangs last year, including a ring that sent Chinese women to Angola
and forced them into prostitution.
"In November 2011, the public security ministry dispatched a
police team to Angola... and detained 16 suspects and freed 19 Chinese
women," it said.
Police also discovered that more than 2,000 children had been abducted
and sold for adoption in 2011 - a big problem in China where couples unable to
conceive or wanting a son, or male heir, can adopt from any source.
In November last year, for instance, police in the eastern province of
Shandong broke up a human trafficking gang that bought babies from poor families
and sold them on for as much as US$8,000 (S$10,040).
Abductions and trafficking in China have caused huge public concern,
but despite regular government vows to crack down hard on the crime, incidents
still emerge on a regular basis.
In one scandal that shocked the nation, authorities in 2007 found that
thousands of people had been abducted and forced into slave labour in
brickyards and mines across China.
More recently, police rescued 16 under-age girls forced into
prostitution in the northern region of Inner Mongolia last April, and freed 89
children in July in a crackdown on trafficking launched earlier in the year.
Police also arrested 369 people in the operation, which aimed to break
up a pair of "large criminal enterprises" involved in child-trafficking
across 14 provinces, they said at the time.
Nearly 11,300 people accused of trafficking were punished from 2008 to
2011 and the number of traffickers has shrunk, the official Xinhua news agency
said earlier this month, without saying how they were punished.
The report also said there was a drop in the number of cases involving
kidnapped babies, but added that a rising number of people were selling their
own babies to earn money.
Most trafficked babies still go to desperate couples willing to
illegally adopt a child, it said.
The ministry said it had built a nationwide system last year that
collects DNA data from the parents of children suspected of having been
kidnapped.
Police then input the DNA of children rescued from trafficking rings
into the system, and if there is a match, can return the youngsters to their
parents as quickly as possible.
The database also helps the police in cases of illegal adoptions, as
they can prove that a child has been unlawfully taken in by a family if his or
her DNA matches that of somebody reported missing.
AFP
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