In China, parents mourn children abducted by traffickers

In the quiet village of Shang Di, wedged among factory towns in southern China, Deng Huidong wheels out a dusty two-seater tricycle that her nine-month-old son rode the day he was abducted outside her family house in 2007.

Little Ruicong, who was snatched by men in a white van as he played in an alleyway, hasn't been seen since.

He is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of children who go missing in China each year, victims of roving criminal gangs preying on vulnerable areas.

"My heart is bleeding," said Ms Deng as she cried beside a framed photograph of her son splashing in a bath tub.

"I just want to find my son. Everytime I see a child, it reminds me of my son and I wonder whether I will see him again."

While China has made giant economic and social strides over the past few decades, the number of abducted children remains alarmingly high in a nation whose wrenching one-child policy and yawning income disparities have fuelled demand for children particularly male heirs, trafficked by underground syndicates.

Human trafficking is widespread across China with kidnapping cases reported in numerous provinces across the country, according to witnesses and postings on missing child websites.

Some children are abducted to serve as props for beggars and women are also kidnapped and sold into prostitution or as forced labour in factories.

While many parents are aware of the problem and have bolstered supervision of their kids in known blackspots, elsewhere, particularly in rural areas, a lack of publicity and media exposure means parents are unaware of the problem and often let their children play outdoors unsupervised.

Estimates are difficult to come by, though the China Ministry of Public Security reported investigating 2,566 potential trafficking cases last year.

"Due to lack of information and the difficulty of tracing children in a vast country such as China, very few children have actually been found," Kirsten Di Martino, Unicef's chief of Child Protection in China said.

The plight of such torn families is often made worse by indifferent, sometimes callous treatment by local police, lax child trafficking laws and poor enforcement.

"In one case, the traffickers even dared to abduct a child right inside a police station... this shows how rampant they are," remarked Zheng Chunzhong, a bakery owner in Dongguan whose son was kidnapped in 2003.

Since then, the slim, softly-spoken Mr Zheng has pressured Dongguan authorities to do more to fight the problem, forming a local alliance of some 200 parents who held a recent protest march outside local government offices.

"There are too many cases of missing children. They (the police) are too embarrassed to let higher-level officials know," he said during a lunch that was interrupted by a public security officer, a reminder of the police surveillance he says he's long endured due to his outspokenness on the issue.

China's relatively soft anti-trafficking laws have made it difficult to locate missing children.

In its 2009 report on human trafficking, the US State Department said China's trafficking laws "do not conform to international standards". It urged China to "significantly improve efforts to investigate and prosecute trafficking offences and convict and punish trafficking offenders, including public officials complicit in trafficking."

Not only have current laws failed to deter the buying of children, traditional patriarchal values remain deeply engrained in places such as Chaozhou and in poor, rural communities where families still see nothing wrong in buying a kidnapped boy.

"Further policy action particularly in the area of social protection is required to reduce the dependence of rural parents on their sons for support in old age, sickness and other difficulties," said Unicef's Mr Di Martino.

Boys, particularly toddlers, can fetch €3,129 on the black market, whereas girls fetch much less, around €356, according to media reports, making it a lucrative illicit trade.

Parents like Ms Deng have transformed their grief to activism, travelling across China with banners and leaflets of their missing children, while networking by phone and the Internet to lobby authorities for tougher laws and effective enforcement.

"Until now there are no real laws punishing buyers... if there is no one buying the children, they wouldn't snatch the children in the first place," said Ms Deng.

But Fu Hualing, a legal expert at the University of Hong Kong said cracking down more on buyers could bring social strain.