Society

Shelters told to help kids return home

By He Dan and Shao Wei (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-05-06 07:27

BEIJING - Shelters for homeless people throughout the country are being called upon to work closely with their counterparts in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and send children home who are from that part of the country.

The call was made by a senior official from the Ministry of Civil Affairs on Wednesday as part of a national campaign against child abduction.

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The civil affairs departments in all provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities are required to set up at least one child rescue center to offer temporary shelter to displaced children and must later arrange to transport them back to Xinjiang, Dou Yupei, vice-minister of civil affairs, said at a conference in Beijing.

The appointed institutions should take children's cultural and religious backgrounds into account and provide care and services accordingly, Dou said.

The child rescue centers should also carefully check the identities of anyone calling by trying to collect rescued children, he added.

In late April, Zhang Chun-xian, Party secretary of Xinjiang, pledged to bring home children who are missing from his region. Many who disappear are forced or tricked into begging or stealing in other parts of the country.

The number of homeless children who originated in Xinjiang has risen sharply in the past decade and such children have been turning up on the streets much farther from home, said Turenjan, a Uygur sociologist from the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences.

By comparing his studies on abducted children in 2000 with his work in 2011, Turenjan found that children from Xinjiang, who began turning up in big cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, 10 years ago, are now seen in small and medium-sized cities.

"It's encouraging that the government is taking positive measures to find and bring these wandering children back to Xinjiang," Turenjan told China Daily on Thursday. "What we should do next is offer long-term help to those who are rescued and prevent them from returning to a life of wandering the streets."

His words were echoed by Ma Li, who is director of a rescue center for homeless children in Xuzhou city, in East China's Jiangsu province.

Ma called for the establishment of specialized educational institutions for children who are rescued from street lives and who may have been forced to beg or pick pockets. He said such children are often turned away by schools after they are rescued or are so far behind that they cannot catch up with their peers.

But many rescue centers say they do not have the financial and staff resources to do all they would like for such children.

Minors Discipline Center in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, received about 4,000 children during the past two years, most of them had been abducted by people-traffickers from underdeveloped areas in southern Xinjiang, said Xiao Rui, head of the organization.

To help them recover from the mental and physical pain they endured, the center offers a minimum of one year of training and free psychological counseling, Xiao said.

"We don't want them to go back to the streets," said Xiao. "But this is tough work and we've met many difficulties, especially in terms of money and professional counselors."