The public education project that targets the ‘taboo’ subject of child sexual abuse in China
Project HOPE aims to mobilise the public against a serious issue that parents and authorities ‘often try to sweep under the carpet’
Watching a film rarely had been so disturbing for Wang Xueying.
“I was extremely angry [afterward] and couldn’t sleep for the whole night,” the 18-year-old student from the eastern province of Jiangsu recalled of viewing the 2011 Korean film Silenced.
The groundbreaking film, which is based on accounts of real-life systemic child sexual abuse at a deaf school in South Korea, helped raise awareness of a taboo subject in the traditionally conservative country.
Around the same time in 2016, her classmate Yang Xihang, 18, came across numerous news reports of children being sexually assaulted by their teachers and could not stop reading about the victims’ ordeals.
Inspired to move others against a serious and prevalent issue that parents and authorities in China often try to sweep under the carpet, Wang and Yang decided to set up an anti-child sexual abuse education programme in their hometown of Changshu.
The pair said they were deeply moved by the testimony of abuse survivors found on Chinese social media.
