Child sex assault cases rising in Chinese mainland: report

Deputies to the NPC and experts attend a seminar to call for immediate action on preventing child sex abuse, on March 2, 2017.[Photo: youth.cn]

433 child sexual abuse cases, involving 778 victims, were reported in the Chinese mainland in 2016, a 30 percent rise compared with the previous year, according to a new report. 

The report on child sexual abuse cases in 2016 was released by the Girls' Protection Foundation, a non-governmental group, at a seminar focusing on helping to prevent sexual abuse against children, held on Thursday.

Most of the victims were aged between 7 and 14; however, the youngest was less than 2 years old. 719 of the 778 children involved were girls, the report shows.

For the first time since 2013, the number of child sex abuse cases in rural areas had exceeded that in urban areas, with 329 of the 433 incidents occurring in the countryside.

The report says that many children were "left behind" in the countryside while their parents go to the cities to work, and hadn't received much education about sex abuse prevention at school.

Lan Chunyao, a deputy to the National People's Congress, said the government should not only make a greater investment in schools in rural areas, but should also build more schools for the children of migrant workers in cities to help reduce the chances of child sexual abuse.

The report says that 300 assault cases involved people known to the children, including their teachers (27.33 percent), neighbours (24.33 percent), close relatives (12 percent) and other family members (10 percent). Offenders responsible for 127 of the cases were strangers to the children.

The majority of the offenders were men.

A seminar is held in Beijing to call for immediate action on preventing child sex abuse, on March 2, 2017.[Photo: youth.cn]

22.12 percent of the offenders were teachers, school bus drivers, chefs in schools, staff members of kindergartens, security guards and so on, whose occupations gave them easy access to children. 

According to a survey of 9,151 parents, conducted by the Girls' Protection Foundation, 41.37 percent of them say they had never taught their children how to protect themselves from sexual assault.

97.25 percent of them say they expected schools to shoulder the responsibility of educating their children about sex abuse prevention.

Cases of sex abuse against children are under reported, and only one in seven child sexual abuse cases are reported in China, South China Morning Post quoting Xinhua reported last year.

A group of 200 or so people including deputies to the National People's Congress, various experts, and reporters attended the seminar in Beijing.