Is it possible to stop human trafficking?

This video started off the same as many other charity videos on TikTok, with light music and cheerful mood. Everything changed when a woman appeared in the phone camera, with thin clothings far from adequate for the freezing temperature, mumbling incoherently and shivering slightly. A heavy chain ties her to a wall of a doorless shed. This video sparked public outrage. Furious audiences started questioning: Who is she? Why is she locked up like this? On the same day, the local government released a statement to quell the argument: Her name was Yang; she was locked up because she had unpredictable violent behaviors; she married Dong in 1998; they had eight children together. Contrary to the hope of the official, the statement brings up more questions: how did she give birth to eight children under the strict “one child policy” (just lifted in 2016)? Has she been abused or sold under coercion? As internet users were still demanding answers, more disturbing stories emerged: there were a lot more similar local cases, unsolved and unnoticed. The latest statement posted in February sets this issue to a contemporary end: She is most likely a victim of human trafficking. This makes us wonder: why does human trafficking still persist in China even after so many years of development?

Two factors combined contribute to the persisting trafficking in China: skewed gender ratio and the pressure to be married. Traditionally, when a man and a woman get married, the wife longer belongs to her own family and becomes a new member of the husband’s family. Combined with the bias that men are most suitable to be in dominating positions, this tradition further proved that having a son ensures a continued family line. Thus, families favor male babies who are the only ones qualified to carry on the heritage of a family. The one child policy the Chinese government post in 1981 exacerbates discrimination against female babies. “it(one-child policy) skewed China’s gender ratio because people preferred to abort or abandon their female babies” ()Families in cities chose abortion when a female fetus was detected. In rural areas, without the technology to identify gender before the child was born, newborn female babies could be abandoned or killed. As a result, according to China’s 2020 national census, the ratio of male vs female is now 105:100, meaning there are 34.9 million more males than females. As boys become men, the marriage pressure takes place. As an old Chinese saying goes “男大当婚” [Men should get married whenever he is old enough], establishing a family is seen as an indispensable part of life. So, single men feel pressured to find a wife and have a child. When he was unable to get a wife with his own ability, purchasing a woman became the easiest solution. Saying that this is “the easiest solution”, I do not mean that this solution is ethical and recommended. As obvious as it is to me, the Chinese government also realized that human trafficking should be stopped.

Starting from 1979, there is a tendency to increase the sentencing of women’s abduction and trafficking in Chinese criminal law. In 1979, the traffickers might face prison sentences of at most five years. In 1991, traffickers could be sentenced to prison for five years to death penalty. In addition, purchasing women and children could be sentenced to three years in prison at most. The Supreme Law’s judicial interpretation in 2017 emphasized even more respect for women’s will, stating that human trafficking in the name of establishing marriage against should be prosecuted. Apart from having more severe punishment for traffickers and buyers, an action plan was published in 2013 and renewed in 2020. The action plan focuses on prevention and education. It proposed policies such as standardize job search procedures, and investigate in companies present in career fairs

However, there is a fact worth noting: without a seller, there is no buyer. People appear to be overly tolerant towards the buyer while condemning the traffickers. The law is just the same. The crime of abducting and trafficking in women and children is defined under Article 240 of the Criminal Law. The normal penalty is a fixed-term sentence of not less than five years and not more than ten years in jail. If there are extremely harsh conditions, it might be sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in jail, life in prison, or even death. Article 241 states that if rape, unlawful imprisonment, and other horrors are not taken into account, the maximum term for just buying women and children is only three years in prison. Buyer and seller, three years and the death penalty, the sentences clearly do not match — the criminal law hits the former much less harshly.

The current law imposes even less severe sanctions on buying people than on buying animals. Article 341 of the Criminal Law stipulates the crime of illegally purchasing and selling precious and endangered wild animals, precious and endangered wildlife products, and the purchase and sale of precious and endangered wild animals and their products. Imprisonment or criminal detention, especially serious ones, may be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than ten years. According to the judicial interpretation, buying one langur can be sentenced to more than five years in prison, and buying two is more than ten years. Why is the statutory sentence for the crime of bribing women and children so light? The legislators may be considering the long-standing “national conditions” of China’s human trafficking. In some places, helping old bachelors to buy women to solve the problem of marriage is something that can only be done with the strength of the whole village — everyone is responsible, and everyone is not responsible.

But after these incidents were exposed, the police acted immediately, and some prisoners were arrested and sentenced to 1,000 years in prison, and the prisoner’s wife was also convicted as an accessory. Most of the victims were properly accommodated, and some later wrote books about their experiences and regained control of their lives in another way. There are also victims who have sued the government for malfeasance for being kidnapped for failing to monitor sex offenders on parole, winning tens of millions of dollars in damages. Most states in the United States have laws that require teachers, psychologists, social workers and other practitioners to report signs of child abuse when they see signs of child abuse. Failure to report may face penalties ranging from fines to criminal felonies. When they discovered the crimes around them, many ordinary people would bravely lend a helping hand. The detained women in Cleveland were finally able to be rescued because their cries for help were heard by their neighbors.

Severe punishment sounds like the best solution, however, using severe penalties to deter buyers to curb sales and harm is unlikely to work out as people expected. Because, for the buyer, various bachelors living in impoverished mountainous areas, the benefits of buying a wife to get married and have children may be a rigid need that must be realized, just like in the big cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, it is a rigid need to buy a house. In the same way, no matter how high the price is, he will buy it. When a benefit is large enough and becomes a rigid need, and the probability of being severely punished is small enough, even if the punishment in law is increased to life imprisonment, it will have little effect. Based on this information, we may also infer from the unsolved cases that the government feared that harsh punishment would be not welcomed by the locals. So, the key issue is never how high the penalty is set on paper, but rather the probability of the incident and the strength of the actual law enforcement. In the face of the peasants who just need their wife, it can only be a beautiful ideal to expect case investigators who live in the same area with these people historically and culturally to strike hard. Because those buyers were originally part of a social network of local acquaintances. Therefore, even if the case has to be dealt with due to the woman’s relatives coming to look for it or the media exposure, etc., the investigators have no strong just motive to identify rape, detention and other serious crimes, and finally deal with it according to the light punishment of the purchasing behavior. Raising a severe sentence or even a death sentence on paper for the act of bribing only satisfies the public’s sense of indignation, and may force a worse result, that is, the local law enforcement officers face a high starting sentence. It may not even be convicted or even rescued, because filing a case means putting the local people to death and forming a feud, and it may not be possible to get along in the local area.

(Education would be able to help with the situation?)

The essence of trafficking in women lies in the deprivation of women’s personal rights. In this black transaction, women are reduced to “commodities” for sale: they are marked with a price tag because of their reproductive value and labor value, waiting to be selected and sold, and then fall into the quagmire of “marriage” that cannot be escaped. This kind of objectification of people not only exists on the borders of the country and deep in the mountains, but also in the life that we can see. It’s not just these lives that are priced: sky-high betrothal gifts, egg sales, paid surrogacy… These “deals” that are closer to us and use the body as a bargaining chip, the logic behind it is so similar to the abduction of women. This deformed equivalence relationship is rooted in the unequal power of outdated patriarchal thinking. This is a question about “humanity”, a foundation of equality and a moral bottom line that should not be retreated in a free society. The fate of every person who yearns for equality and insists on dignity is closely linked to them — when a life is placed on both ends of the scale with money, no one can stay outside the glass window of society.