‘Left-behind children’ found stabbed to death in southern China
Two children of migrant worker living away from home latest vulnerable youngsters to die violently in an impoverished area of Guizhou province
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 05 August, 2015, 1:20pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 05 August, 2015, 7:08pm
Zhuang Pinghui
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The home where the bodies of the children were found. Photo: People's Daily
Two children of a migrant worker living away from home have been found murdered in the same area of China where the suicide of four other “left-behind children” shocked the nation earlier this year, official media reported.
Left-behind children are those who stay in their home villages while their parents are working in cities, often far way. Tragedies involving negligence and abuse of these “virtual orphans” make headlines from time to time.
Zhang Yunyu, 15, and her brother Zhang Yunhai, 12, were found dead with stab wounds on Tuesday morning at their home in a village near Bijie in Guizhou province, Xinhua reported.
The pair lived with their sister, Zhang Yunzhuo, 17, while their father was away working as a mason in the city of Guiyang. Their mother and grandparents had died.
The older sister spent Monday night at a relative’s home and found the bodies the next morning, the report said.
The tragedy happened two months after four rural children of the same city, one boy and three girls aged five to 13, who lived alone in poverty, killed themselves by drinking pesticide. Their father was working away from home.
The shocking deaths prompted a debate in China about the fate of “left-behind children” and whether enough was done to help them, especially three years after the shocking deaths of another five young children in Bijie, a poor area in the southwest of China.
Five boys living on the streets in Bijie were found dead in a large rubbish container in 2012 where they were suspected to have died from carbon monoxide poisoning while sheltering from the cold.
The boys were seen wandering around the neighbourhood and sleeping in abandoned buildings a week before they were found dead.
Many rural children in China are left with their grandparents or by themselves when their parents head to the cities for better jobs, especially in poor provinces such as Sichuan, Henan, Anhui, Hunan and Guizhou.
These parents leave children behind because of the high cost of living in cities and strict household registrations that often prevent them from receiving social benefits such as medical insurance and education.
The Bijie government said about a tenth of the city’s school-age children – more than 164,000 youngsters – live in homes without parents.
A 2012 survey by the All-China Women’s Federation found that more than 40 per cent of rural children in Hubei, Guangxi and Guizhou provinces were left behind, and that the percentage went beyond 50 per cent in Chongqing, Sichuan, Anhui, Jiangsu and Jiangxi provinces.
According to figures from the education ministry last month, 20.75 million rural primary- and secondary-school-age pupils live away from their parents. These children are often left to fend for themselves and with weak societal support.
Du Shuang, director general of NGO Growing Home, said left-behind rural children often had to deal with negative emotions such as loneliness. Boys were usually more aggressive and girls tended to shut themselves from the outside world.
She said it was impossible for rural children to receive quality mental health care and that NGOs like hers were working on developing products to address the problem.
A June report by the China Youth and Children Research centre showed that such children faced serious mental health issues. Nearly 18 per cent of the left-behind children they surveyed said they themselves were their main source of mental support, and more than 22 per cent said no one was around to help them when they needed it.
Lu Mai, secretary general with China Development Research Foundation, wrote in the magazine China Reform that to solve the problems left-behind children faced, the priority should be to restore families as a platform for children to enjoy public services and to communicate with society.
“That requires speeding up people-oriented urbanisation and reducing the number of children being left behind in rural areas by improving the lives of farmers,” he said.
Yang Dongping, from the Beijing Institute of Technology, said it was more practical to allow rural children to immigrate with their parents because being away from their families deprived them from effective education.
Yang added that China needed urgently to provide equal public services to migrant children, and that social organisations had to provide training and teacher support for schools that specialised in admitting such children.
