Unaddressed Grief

When is the love of parents for their only child unrequited? When the child is abducted, taken from their home, valued for the riches their warm living bodies as adoptable children represent. The child will inevitably forget, forge a new identity by necessity. And in China, where the one-child-per-family directive obtains, what could conceivably be more disastrous for parents than the loss of their only child?

A personal emotional disaster of monumental proportions. As monumental as the destructive force of the earthquake that hit Sichuan province in northern China, killing 69,000 people and injuring 375,000 more, leaving 4.8 million homeless. The Chinese government was quick to respond with emergency aid, then reeled in horror as parents of thousands of children mourned their deaths, their only children.

Deaths caused by slovenly architecture, by sub-grade materials, by corrupt government officials issuing building contracts to uncaring, corrupt construction companies. And there are also the incidents of abductions of impoverished youth, taken into slavery to work in the most hellish of manufacturing sites, as prisoners, their whereabouts unknown by their frantic families.

Add to that sad and sorry list of misery, the 200,000 missing Chinese children, aged from infancy to ten, taken from the safety and comfort of their loving families by abductors whose sole purpose is to sell the children to intermediaries who themselves sell them to wholesale purveyors of children for grand profit to barren couples desperate for children of their own.

Boy children are high on the list of desirables, the younger the better, to enable them to readily adjust to their new homes. Girl children - in a country that cherishes its boys and begrudges its girls - are less desirable, but homes can be found for them too, on presentation of adequate payment. If not within China, then internationally.

Infant girls will bring their immediate abductors an average of $175 profit, and a grander $1,000 for boys. That profit increases as they go up the chain to the next link, where girls are sold for $400 and boys for $2000. Their last exchange in the criminal abduction chain brings a value of $1500 for girls and $4000 for boys.

Parents must ensure they take greater care for the security of their children? How about a trusted employee of a shop offering to take the shop-owner's little boy to the bathroom, then absconding with him, never to be seen again? How about an abductor walking to the open door of another shop where a child plays in sight of its parents and is swooped up and taken.

How about a young boy left in the care of his grandfather, watching as the child flies his kite high, high in the sky, then disappears forever from the lives of his parents, his grandparent. A U.S. State Department report in 2007 claimed that 20,000 women and children are "trafficked" in the country on an annual basis.

This is an instance of under-reportage, since there are many abductions not recorded, and the official statistics are therefore radically underplaying this massive underworld phenomenon. Police, faced with so many reports of child abductions routinely react by claiming there is insufficient evidence.

Complaints at every level of government appear futile. The problem is so pervasive, so massive, it would appear to arrest the attempts of government agencies to proceed. And then, of course, there is the very real possibility that some government agents are quite simply complicit, paid for their quiescence.

One distraught and determined father, attempting to track down the presence of his son in a geographic area whose residents are known to "adopt" abducted children as their own, by posing as a buyer, was successful in rescuing two kidnapped children, but not his own missing child.

The problem is endemic, accepted in some areas, as a panacea for locals whose childlessness renders them a low opinion in the society they inhabit. Whose social mores find it acceptable enough to adopt kidnapped children with little thought to their provenance and the grief and misery their absence occasions to others.

In the face of such a monumental and massively difficult problem, police develop an unfortunate attitude of defeat, surrendering to the inevitable; a child abducted is a child that never existed. In the words of one father: "Police told me not to search anymore. They said, 'You just take it as if you never had this child before'.

"I was almost paralyzed hearing that. I asked: 'At Chinese New Year when I miss my son, will you be able to lend your son to me for several days?'"

From: Stolen Children, Canwest News Service, Aileen McCabe