Chinese man given 12 years in prison for raping 10-year-old girl
- Child from east China’s Shandong province was seen by doctors in August and found to be five months pregnant
- Conviction was first in province under a new central government scheme to better protect children from abuse
A Chinese man has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for raping a 10-year-old girl who became pregnant as a result of the assault, according to official reports.
The case came to light when the child, identified only by the pseudonym Xiaoye, from east China’s Shandong province was seen by a doctor in August and found to be five months pregnant, the provincial prosecutors’ office said in a statement on its social media account on Friday.
Under a new system introduced by the central government last year to better protect victims of child abuse, the doctor reported the case to his supervisors who in turn passed the matter on to the police.
Following an investigation, police detained a man surnamed Liu and the case was passed to prosecutors in the city of Rushan. They filed a prosecution request to the courts in January and Liu was subsequently tried and sentenced, the statement said, without saying when the trial took place.
Xiaoye had an abortion and was given counselling to help her deal with her experience, it said.
To protect against the possibility of a backlash from the public in her hometown, authorities arranged for Xiaoye and her mother to move to a new city and helped find a new school for the child. The All-China Women’s Federation also helped to find the mother a new job.
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Under the new protection scheme, all government agencies and civil servants are required to notify the police if they find evidence of or suspect a child has been sexually, physically or otherwise abused. They must also report all cases of pregnancy in girls aged under 14.
Xiaoye’s was the first such case to be handled in Shandong.
A report published by Chinese researchers in 2019 estimated that between eight and 12 per cent of the country’s 270 million children had experienced some form of sexual assault, and that 2.7 million had been raped.
However, according to the government’s “2020 Child Sexual Abuse Case Statistics” and “Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Education Survey Report”, just 332 cases of sexual abuse against children – involving 845 victims – were reported by the media last year.
