Missing kids’ families find hope online
Print Edition
FENG Jianlin has never lost hope that one day he will be reunited with his daughter, who has been missing for more than 6 years.
“As more and more people join the campaign to trace lost children nationwide, (I realize) I am not alone,” he said.
Universal Children’s Day fell yesterday, bringing the issue of child abduction to the fore once again.
In recent years, in addition to government efforts, the development of online social networks in China has mobilized grassroots support to join the campaign.
Feng, 40, lives in north China’s Shanxi Province. On March 20, 2008, his nine-year-old daughter went to school after lunch and never returned home. Police concluded that the girl was snatched.
“It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Feng explained, “I put notices in newspapers, appealed on television and distributed flyers on the street. But all my efforts seemed in vain.”
However, Feng says the Internet made it possible for people from all over the country to join the search.
In 2010, Feng set up a website to connect volunteers, police and the media in an effort to locate his daughter and other missing children. To date, it has returned 14 children to their families.
Meanwhile, in 2011, Yu Jianrong, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, set up a Sina Weibo microblog account asking the public to post photographs of child beggars, as some may have been abducted from their parents.
It was hoped that families of abducted children might spot them on the site. The account has almost 34,500 followers.
One success story is Peng Gaofeng being reunited with his son who was snatched in March 2008 in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. The child was spotted in 2011 by a man who had seen the boy’s picture on Weibo.
Established in 2007, baobeihuijia.com — which means “return home baby” — is another major resource for parents searching for abducted children. Founder Zhang Baoyan said that the site has 20,000 registered volunteers.
In other initiatives, volunteers crisscross the country searching for missing children. Over five years, up until his death in January, Wei Ji, from Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, reunited more than 60 families with their children.
The government also plays an important role in campaigns to bust trafficking rings and locate children.
The State Council issued the first state-level abduction action plan in 2007, ordering government at all levels to establish mechanisms to address the abduction of women and children. In 2013, a second plan was launched.
And in 2009, the Public Security Ministry set up a DNA database to assist the search. This includes DNA from the parents of abducted children and samples taken from children thought to have been abducted.
In 2013, 2,765 child abduction cases were handled by the authorities and 631 children found their birth parents through the database, according to State Council figures.
However, there are also calls for more to be done to stop children going missing in the first place.
“Prevention is more important than action after the fact. We should try our best to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again,” Feng said.
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