"I thought after all these years, I could finally forget. But I was wrong; I am reminded every time I see similar photos or videos on the Internet. I have tried to forget but it was so painful and disgusting," Li Jing (pseudonym), a 30-year-old woman from East China's Fujian Province, told the Global Times on Thursday.
When she was in first grade in primary school, Li was repeatedly sexually abused by her teacher. At that time, she did not understand what the teacher had done to her, but all she could feel was misery and pain because her classmates shunned her and sometimes locked her in the classroom for "her close relationship with the teacher."
As she grew up, she did her best not to think about what had happened to her and tried to move on. However, traumatic memories engulfed her again when she saw a video featuring two half-naked young girls pillow fighting on a bed circulating on a social media platform rescently. She became even more outraged when she realized that most other users saw nothing wrong with the video, which she regarded as being a form of child pornography.
She fought with other users on the platform and requested the platform take down the video. However, all her efforts ended with mockery from other Net users, many of whom said she was just making an unnecessary fuss.
"People may know that spreading pictures or videos of naked women may constitute a crime but rarely do they pay attention to child pornography," said Li.
Beijing police announced on Wednesday that they have cracked down on a gang who spread child pornography on overseas Internet platforms. Among the more than 30 victims, most were from rural areas and the gang filmed them being raped or otherwise sexually assaulted.
Dark Web
In March, Beijing Internet police received a tip-off from the Ministry of Public Security that U.S. law enforcement officers had found some Chinese Net users publishing large quantities of pictures and videos of child pornography on several overseas "dark Web" platforms, which are only accessible using a special Internet browser, the Beijing Times reported Thursday.
The dark Web posts and associated IP addresses showed the posts were coming from Beijing, said the report.
Zhang Min, an Internet police officer, told the Beijing Times that the poster spread over 100 videos showing young girls being abused.
The people behind the videos had lured the children to houses or forests with candies and toys and then abused them.
The videos have been viewed over 20,000 times, said the report.
Police later identified the suspected poster as a Beijing college student surnamed Sun, 19, and confiscated 400 gigabytes of videos, pictures, audio files and text files about child pornography in his computer and four terabytes more on his external hard drive.
Sun confessed that he purchased the videos for between 30 to 3,000 yuan ($4.4 to $436) each and then spread them on an overseas Internet forum for free "out of personal interest." He was sentenced to one and a half years in jail.
Meanwhile, police officers captured another seven suspects for spreading pornography and 17 suspects who were accused of raping and sexually harassing children.
According to police, the victims were mostly from rural areas in South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and adjacent Southwest China's Guizhou Province. The suspected rapists were their neighbors, fellow-villagers and migrants.
Poor awareness
Monica Cui, executive director of Safe Kids China, a Shanghai-based NGO, told the Global Times on Thursday that this case shows that people's awareness of child abuse is insufficient, which may let some offenders feel that it is easy to sexually abuse children.
"While the authorities should enhance their supervision of child pornography, parents should also enhance their efforts in teaching their children about sex at an early age," said Cui, adding that children should know at an early age what parts of their body should not be revealed to others.
According to a report released in March by Beijing-based NGO Girls' Protection, of the 340 cases of child sexual abuse revealed by media reports in 2015, 96 involved abusers who had abused at least two children and the perpetrators of the abuse in 70 percent of the 340 cases were found to be acquaintances of the victims, including teachers and family members.
Sun Xuemei, one of the founders of Girls' Protection, told the Global Times on Thursday that she has been holding lectures across the country to teach children about their bodies, how to prevent sexual assault, what constitutes sexual abuse and how to deal with being sexually assaulted.
