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Mentally impaired women in China need more legal protection, police say, after a trafficking gang praying on such women was busted.
Last month police caught ten people, suspected of taking mentally impaired women from south China's Guangdong Province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region to Shandong in the east, where they were locked in a pigsty, before being passed on to buyers.
"The suspects could make a profit ten times their cost," said Xu Jian, an investigating officer in the case.
Treated like pigs
On Feb. 8, police noticed a woman and two men behaving strangely on a train from Guangxi. Investigation found that the pair, Fu and Fan, had bought the woman in Fangchenggang City. Both confessed that it was not the first time they did it.
When Sun, a suspect from Shandong, received an order, he would tell Fu and Fan, who then asked matchmakers to "provide goods", according to Xu Jian.
"Most of the trafficked women were in their 20s or 30s," Xu said. "The matchmaker would give the family of these victims an amount of money, usually 3,000 to 5,000 (430 to 800 U.S. dollars), before taking the woman away in the name of finding her a husband."
The woman was then sent to a pig farm run by Sun, where buyers would visit and make the deal. "Buyers were mostly men from remote mountain areas too poor to find a wife," Xu said. They made the purchase just for offspring, mostly paying 50,000 to 100,000 yuan for a wife.
Since 2013, the gang has trafficked at least ten women, earning more than 600,000 yuan in total.
According to Lan, one of the matchmakers, it was not difficult to take away the victims, because their families, usually impoverished, view them as a burden.
"They were eager to find the woman a husband," Lan confessed. "If I told them that there was someone willing the marry their daughter, they would not ask for more details."
No going back
More than 30,000 trafficked women were rescued in China in 2014, but police told Xinhua that the number of settled cases involving mentally impaired women was just "the tip of the iceberg".
"Most were from rural areas, where villagers lack legal awareness," said Wu Yongming, vice chairman of the Social Sciences Association of Jiangxi Province. "Some villagers even don't know that human trafficking is illegal, therefore they wouldn't report it at all."
An amendment to the Criminal Law passed in August has brought harsher punishments and now not just the traffickers, but also the buyers, previously immune to punishment, will face criminal penalties.
While calling for better enforcement of the law, Li Lanying, vice president of the law school at Xiamen University, believes that clauses should be included especially for mentally impaired women.
Wu Yongming sees other problems in rural areas. When police send victims back home, families sometimes refuse to accept them, pleading poverty.
"We need to ensure the welfare of this group, so that they will no longer be viewed as burden of the family and sold," he said.
