Young Girls Kidnapped for Brides in China

[artemisia1]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article302720.ece

Bride-trafficking grows as China's population of single men soars
By David Eimer in Beijing
Published: 31 July 2005

"When 16-year-old Qing Yang was kidnapped in Sichuan province last year and sold for £360 to a desperate bachelor, it took her family and a private detective six months to track her down in Jiangsu province, hundreds of miles away. By then, she had been raped and forced to live as the wife of the man who bought her.

Qing's story, highlighted in a BBC documentary, is all too common in China, where "wives", mostly young girls from rural areas, can be acquired for between about £500 and £2,000. Despite a government crackdown on bride-trafficking that has seen some 42,000 women rescued over the past four years, many more are never found."

(BTW, this is the first DU thread I've started.)

[Fridays Child]

1. Congratulations on your maiden thread posting.

And, regarding the article, what a nightmare for those poor, young women. :(

[mntleo2]

2. Mesogenic Hatred Of Women

def: mes·o·gen·ic (mz-jnk, ms-)
adj.

Of or relating to the capacity of a virus to lethally infect embryonic hosts after a short incubation period but that is incapable of infecting immature and adult hosts.


When they can only have one child and that child needs to be male because a daughter's parents are not taken care of in their old age, what do these people expect? Because of their myopic view of women they are abandoning their female babies, they only want to raise boys so guess what???? Someday there won't be as any girls left in the whole country!!! The day was bound to come that they were going to look around and realize a culture also needs women... DUH!

Sheesh that kind of hubris is stupid!

Cat In Seattle

[smirkymonkey]

6. Can an entire society get a Darwin Award?

Just asking.

[AndreaCG]

3. Plus a lot of the unwanted girls are being adopted by foreigners

As in the Simpsons episode where Patty (or Selma) adopts a Chinese girl baby.

[Glenda]

4. Yeah, the whole "one-child" policy

has some repercussions, where the "one-child" is often chosen to be male.

[SydBinFL]

5. Scary Numbers

Saw a National Geographic program last year that said by the year 2020 there would be 40 million young Chinese men with no one to marry.

[Ms. Clio]

8. A powerful incentive for aggressive militarism

The government will be required to provide all those young men with something to do, in order to ensure domestic order and tranquility. Historically speaking, that something is almost always war.

[artemisia1]

9. Yes, and the "surplus" males in China are

going to be a source of great upheaval. I wonder (fear) whether wealth men will start importing (kidnapping?) women from other Asian countries. This will bear watching as demographic shifts generally herald instability and war.

[Hubert Flottz]

7. It happens in the US too...

Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


snip>

Allegations of welfare fraud, tax fraud, incest, statutory rape, physical, emotional and psychological abuse--hidden by a veil of secrecy, isolation, and deprivation--in the FLDS dominated communities have been widely reported in 2004 throughout United States media. It has been estimated that 33% of the men, women and children in the group are receiving state and federal aid, though 0% unemployment was reported in the 2000 census.

Allegations also have been made that in the four and a half years ending in 2004, the FLDS has excommunicated over 400 teenaged boys, some as young as 13, for seemingly trivial offenses. Former members claim that the purpose of these excommunciations is that in a polygamous society these young men present competition to the older men for multiple wives, and that the boys must go. Six such teenaged boys have filed a conspiracy lawsuit against Jeffs and Sam Barlow, a former Mohave County deputy sheriff and close associate of Jeffs, for a "systematic excommuncation" of young men to reduce competition for wives.

On July 11, 2005, eight men of the church were indicted for sexual contact with minors. At least some of them surrendered to police in Kingman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter_Day_Saints

Ross Chatwin

On Friday, January 23, 2004 a very brave man named Ross Chatwin spoke to the world about his life in the FLDS and its Prophet, Warren Jeffs. First Ross was excommunicated from the Church. Next, the Prophet tried to "reasign" his wife and children. Then he was told to leave his home. That's when Ross decided to speak out against Warren Jeffs.

Read the story of Ross' fight against being evicted from his home and the torment his family has endured. These articles are in chronological order.

http://childbrides.org/ross.html

Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a sect of Mormonism, and America's largest polygamous group. The current leader of the church is Warren Jeffs, who became leader on the death of his father, Rulon Jeffs in 2002. The headquarters are in Hildale, Utah, which is a twin city with Colorado City, Arizona.

Membership and Headquarters
The number of members of the church is unknown; however, their population is estimated at between 6,000 to 8,000 in the twin communities of Colorado City, Mohave County and Hildale, Washington County. The church also has a colony in Bountiful, Canada. In each of these towns, the church is the primary influence and reason for being.

Distinctive Doctrines
The church teaches plurality of wives as a general requirement for the highest eternal salvation of men. It is generally believed in the church that a man should have three wives to fulfill this requirement. Leader and Prophet Rulon T. Jeffs married 22 women and fathered more than 60 children. Critics of this belief say that its practice leads unavoidably to bride shortages and likely to child marriages, incest, and child abuse.

The church currently practices "The Law of Placing" under which all marriages are assigned by the prophet of the church. Many outside of the church, and some inside, view this practice as unduly authoritarian though it helps address by edict the problem of wife shortages. Under the Law of Placing, the prophet elects to give or take wives to or from men according to their worthiness. More...

http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/f/fu/fundamentalist_church_of_jesus_christ_of_latter_day_sain.html

Polygamist sect target of Arizona-Utah inquiry

For decades, allegations of child abuse, forced marriage, incest and misuse of public money fell on deaf ears

Joseph A. Reaves and Mark Shaffer
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 28, 2003 12:00 AM

COLORADO CITY - For most of the past seven decades, authorities refused to listen to the cries of women who claimed their children were being raped in this remote religious community astride the Arizona-Utah line.

They ignored allegations of incest, wife-beating, White slavery and forced marriages.

More often than not, they simply shrugged when insiders whispered about tax dodges, welfare fraud, educational neglect and misspent public funds.

But all that is changing.

http://www.azcentral.com/specials/special45/articles/0928polyg-enforcement-28.html