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Gangs, delinquency a big problem for migrant children
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HUANG Wenjun, 63, and her husband finally saved enough money to return to their hometown in Jiangsu Province, buy a small flat and play with their grandchild.
Just when the couple thought life was about to reward them with happiness, the grievous news came. Their son, Sun Qiang, 26, was killed by a mob.
The couple brought Sun from their hometown to Shanghai when he was 12. They did laborious construction work and put him in a local primary school. But Sun was never welcomed as a new member of the class. That’s because he stole his peers’ things and sometimes assaulted them.
At age 16, he took a wrong turn in life and dropped out of school to become a gangster.
Su is among a rapidly increasing number of convicts from migrant families, an unfortunate statistics that shows migrant kids now account for a majority of the city’s juvenile delinquency.
More than half of the criminals were jailed for theft, robbery, assault or rape.
Recent statistics from the Shanghai Qingpu District People’s Procuratorate showed that from 2009 to 2011, among 253 cases of juvenile delinquency, 85.4 percent of the perpetrators were rural and migrant youths.
Some 60.6 percent of the juvenile criminals came to the city since their parents began to work here. More than a half of the convicts had dropped out of school.
Like Sun, they are often left alone, are poorly supervised and run an extremely high risk of becoming involved in criminal activities.
“He always felt inferior in front of the class and we rarely had time talking to him. When his adviser told me the first time that my son stole a watch, I thought as long as I return it back, it was no big deal,” Huang, his mother, tells Shanghai Daily.
The reasons migrant young people are likely to get into trouble are closely related to their status and relative poverty.
Published last month in the run-up to the Children’s Day, a white paper looked at crimes committed in Beijing in 2013. Of 1,097 cases, 77.4 percent of the perpetrators had received little or no education.
Without a proper hukou, or household registration, from their new city, migrant teenagers are usually barred from attending high schools. Shanghai in 2010 had 570,000 migrant children aged 15 to 19 who were ineligible for high school education.
Also, since the migrant parents usually have to work almost non-stop, their children have no guardian.
They also appear more susceptible to trouble in the first place.
The Center for Children’s Rights and Corporate Social Responsibility, a Beijing partner of Save the Children Sweden, conducted a survey that indicated that 60 percent of left-behind children felt their parents were “not around” when they needed support.
“When their parents are not around, migrant teenagers tend to find the protection from those who are older than them,” says Shao Hui, a retired middle school teacher.
They will try to meet others from the same hometown who have been through the same circumstances. And this will lead them to know many unemployed dropouts.
Unlike the locals, rural migrants have a greater tendency toward violence because their parents often don’t discipline them, Shao observes. She points out that many migrant parents won’t worry if their children fight with others.
“They usually outweigh their peers and some parents even support the fight if their children are discriminated against by the peers,” she says.
“Migrant youths are very defensive,” Shao adds. “Even if no one had done anything wrong to them, they like to show their peers that they are scared of nothing by bullying them.”
Extreme cases appear one after another. Most recently, a frightening video from Beijing was uploaded online and captured the nation’s attention. Three rural youths assaulted a 13-year-old boy, brutally attacking him even as he begged them to stop. They threw rocks at him and urinated on him.
In March in Hainan Province, a teenage girl was stripped naked and beaten up by her migrant peers at school. They even took a video of the whole process. In April, a student in Guangdong Province was forced to eat oily rags in the classroom and take his pants off.
These cases usually happened in private schools, as public schools in China usually ensure better education.
“We don’t have many students who come from migrant families in our school. Maybe one or two students at most in one class. And they are well-behaved just like any other students in the school,” says Ni Siwei, assistant principal of Yan’an Middle School, a leading school in Shanghai.
For a rural migrant youth, getting a chance to go to a key middle school in Shanghai is rare. In Shanghai, there is no test for elementary students to get into middle school. Instead, the middle school will provide a certain quota to the primary schools in its district. Students get a draw to see if they get into the school.
But primary schools of good reputation, which usually are located in areas with middle-class families, get higher quotas.
“Primary schools located where a lot of rural or migrant workers live merely get four or five assigned numbers from the middle school,” Ni says.
On the other hand, some middle schools will have more than half students from migrant or rural families.
“In this case, migrant youths easily get bundled together away from the locals,” Ni says, adding that makes it easier for them to get come under influences.
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