China’s ‘two sessions’ will see calls for action over human trafficking after chained woman scandal
- A video of a mentally ill woman chained in a shack in eastern China that went viral in January has galvanised the nation
- Several participants in the annual political meeting plan to propose measures to combat child abduction and trafficking
As China’s “two sessions” begin, a growing number of delegates to the annual political meetings are calling for reforms to tackle the trafficking of women and children.
Human trafficking – especially that of women and children – quickly became one of the nation’s most glaring domestic issues after a video of a mentally ill woman chained in a dirty shack in eastern China went viral in late January. The woman, a mother of eight who had been chained to the wall by her husband, turned out to be a trafficking victim.
A more recent viral video brought the human trafficking issue to the fore just ahead of the two sessions – the twin meetings of the top advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and the National People’s Congress, the country’s legislature. In this one, a farmer in northwestern Shaanxi province had forced a homeless woman into marriage and confined her in an iron cage.
The China Democratic League, one of the eight “democratic” parties in China, said that it would submit a proposal to the CPPCC to combat child abduction and trafficking.
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Public shaming: accused human traffickers paraded through streets of China’s southern Jinxi city
The methods proposed by the CDL, whose members are mainly drawn from the education and cultural sectors, include registering children’s fingerprints and entering them into a national database, educating the public about the illegality of buying and selling human beings, gender equality, and educating prospective adoptive families about the importance of adopting children by legal means.