Another case of underage forced prostitution in Qidong, Hunan: the main offender is only 15 years old

Red Star News reporter | Pan Junwen, intern reporter Chen Yifan

Editor｜Pan Li

On the afternoon of August 12, 2020, when Liu Yong arrived across the street from a hotel in downtown Zhuzhou, Hunan, a white Iveco had just started its engine and the car body was buzzing. It was a car that picked up girls from nightclubs. More than a dozen seats were filled with people, all of them were fashionable girls with heavy makeup. In the last row, he finally found his niece, Wang Xiao.

A month ago, Wang Xiao ran away from home and cut off contact with her family. When Liu Yong learned about this, he rushed back to Qidong from Changsha. He first called the police and contacted the Women's Federation, then began to search the streets and alleys, posting missing person notices everywhere. In the following time, he and his niece played a cat-and-mouse game.

He pulled his niece out of the car, scolded her loudly, and took her back to Qidong overnight. Along the way, he asked Wang Xiao why she ran away from home. Wang Xiao cried and confessed that she had been forced by another 14-year-old girl to engage in prostitution in Qidong a few months ago and was sexually assaulted by several adult men. At that time, she was only 13 years old.

In July 2021, the Qidong County Court made a first-instance judgment on the two main offenders, convicting them of rape and sentencing them to three and four years in prison respectively. Another local rape case in which a minor was also the main offender was sentenced just one year ago.

1

"elder sister"

On Tuesday, April 28, 2020, Wang Xiao met Pan Yujia for the first time at the Orchard Hotel in Qidong.

At that time, Wang Xiao was in the second grade of junior high school in a school in Qidong. In the eyes of local people, most of the students who studied there had poor grades. Before school that day, a boy she met on a short video platform asked Wang Xiao to go to the Orchard Hotel to play, and she agreed.

Qidong is a county under the jurisdiction of Hengyang City, located in the south-central part of Hunan Province. It is located in a mountainous and hilly area with many mountains and few fields, drought and water shortage, which is inconvenient for farming. It was once the only provincial poverty-stricken county in Hengyang City. Here, short video software connects young people.

They share their emotional lives and post selfies with beauty filters on the app; they also make friends and look for their significant other on the app. The social circle spread out along the Internet gradually expands, and invitations to play are constant, allowing these young people to shuttle back and forth between hotels, KTVs and massage parlors in the old and new city areas day and night. Wang Xiao is one of them.

After school, Wang Xiao successfully arrived at the room he had booked. It is not uncommon for minors to stay in hotels in the local area.

A hotel cleaner revealed that as long as an adult is found to book a room, many teenagers will come with their friends to play cards and smoke in the room. In Qidong, many hotels have massage clubs, KTVs, etc. The front desk of a hotel with a massage club said that they would not ask why teenagers went upstairs.

Pan Yujia came over from the next room. She was about 1.6 meters tall, had black hair that reached her chest, and wore a red dress with short sleeves. In her personal video account, her face still looked childish, but her makeup was like that of an adult, with her eyes curled up, revealing a sense of strength.

Pan Yujia is well-known in the youth circle of Qidong. People in the circle say that she is famous for "bringing sisters". In the local area, "bringing sisters" means that "sisters" protect "sisters" from being bullied, and on the other hand, "sisters" also bring "sisters" into nightclubs.

She saw Wang Xiao and liked her, saying she looked "not bad." Pan Yujia claimed she was about 17 or 18 years old and kept asking Wang Xiao if she wanted to be recognized as her sister.

Previously, other "sisters" had asked her if she was willing to be a younger sister. Wang Xiao remembered that when she was in junior high school, some girls of the same grade would be selected to accompany drinking, and "some girls who were not selected would be unhappy."

At that time, the "sister" of Zhang Ruofei, the main culprit in another rape case of minors in Qidong, also mentioned that she wanted to take Wang Xiao with her, but Wang Xiao refused. Wang Xiao had seen Zhang Ruofei teaching her sister a lesson. She called her disobedient sister to the alley, pressed her against the wall and slapped her, causing her cheeks to be red and swollen. In August 2020, Zhang Ruofei was sentenced for "taking her sister with her", which caused a sensation.

Pan Yujia was as aggressive as Zhang Ruofei. She threatened Wang Xiao and threatened to beat her up if she didn't agree. Qidong County was so small that she could beat Wang Xiao up every time she saw him. A friend of Pan Yujia remembered that she had taught a girl a lesson, and the girl's boyfriend was also present at the time. "The guy didn't dare to say a word. She was not tall, but her aura was very different."

▲The hotel where Wang Xiao was sexually assaulted

This time, Wang Xiao gave in.

Soon after Wang Xiao was recognized as her sister, Pan Yujia found her first customer, who was the owner of a mobile phone repair shop near the central market. He originally wanted to find Pan Yujia, but Pan Yujia finally brought Wang Xiao to the hotel.

At about 4 a.m. on April 29, the boss opened the door for them. He thought Wang Xiao looked young, so he asked, "How old is this girl?" Pan answered, "16 years old."

The boss said he had a midnight snack and only had 400 yuan in cash. Pan Yujia did not bargain, took the money and sent Wang Xiao into the room, and she waited at the door for the transaction to be completed. An hour later, Wang Xiao walked out of the room and Pan Yujia took her back.

That night, Pan Yujia also discussed with another "sister" that they would "take care" of Wang Xiao together in the future. They were responsible for finding clients, and whoever introduced the client would collect the money.

Between April 29 and May 2, 2020, the two arranged five orders for Wang Xiao, and the "sister" was responsible for booking rooms. Three of them were at Qidong Orchard Hotel and two were at Yufeng Hotel. Wang Xiao closed her eyes every time she took an order, but she remembered the smell of those people, a mixture of cigarette smoke and sweat, "some even had smelly feet." The verdict showed that the five orders made a total profit of 2,550 yuan.

During these four days, Wang Xiao was free to move around, but whenever Pan Yujia sent her a message, she would go. "If I lied to her, she said she would have someone beat me up every time she saw me."

On the fifth day, another "sister" asked Pan to take Wang Xiao with her, and the two sides met at the People's Government Square to negotiate. Pan Yujia came over, but before she even got close, she smashed Wang Xiao's head with a slipper. Pan was furious at her sister's betrayal. She broke the phone she had lent to Wang Xiao and threw it on the ground, ready to beat her up, but people around stopped Pan, and the matter of "who takes care of the sister" ended like that.

On the same day, Pan Yujia updated a photo on the short video platform. In the photo, she was wearing a black short-sleeved pajamas and a pair of black flat-heeled mules. She sat with her legs crossed on the edge of the hotel bed, exhaling a puff of smoke, looking a little lonely. "The days when I hold an umbrella alone must also be smooth," she wrote.

"You can't say she was a bad person from the beginning." Pan Yujia's friend said that her family opened a shop in the countryside and their economic conditions were not good. She dropped out of junior high school and was taken care of by other "sisters" like Wang Xiao.

"Bringing younger sisters" is not uncommon in Qidong. He said that the "older sisters" have similar routines to tame younger sisters - coercion and inducement. First, they give the younger sisters sweet things, take them to buy makeup and clothes, and then teach them a lesson and beat them when they are disobedient. When the younger sisters get used to the consumption level that is not suitable for their age, they will go astray to maintain their income.

On September 24, 2020, Pan Yujia's short video platform updated the last dynamic. The next day, she was arrested by the police on suspicion of rape. She was 14 years old at the time.

In March 2021, the Qidong County Procuratorate filed a public prosecution against Pan Yujia and the owner of the mobile phone store. During the trial, Liu Yong sent a photo to Wang Xiao, who was out of town. In the photo, Pan Yujia was wearing a white protective suit and sitting in the courtroom. Her hair was casually tied behind her head, revealing her forehead and a pair of eyes. "She looks very small," Wang Xiao said.

In July of the same year, the Qidong County Court made a first-instance judgment that Pan Yujia and her boss were guilty of rape and sentenced them to three and four years in prison respectively.

2

Boyfriend

Qidong High-speed Railway Station was completed in 2013. One afternoon in the winter of that year, the G530 train stopped here, becoming the first high-speed train to enter Qidong, and Qidong's road to poverty alleviation also began to accelerate.

In the west of the county where the high-speed railway station is located, high-rise apartments and high-end hotels are lined up, and the roads are wide and clean. However, the further east you go, the narrower the roads are, the denser the buildings are, and the older the buildings appear. Many locals regard the intersection of National Highway 322 and Xianzheng West Road as the dividing line between the old and new urban areas. The terrain of the old city in the east is slightly lower, so they are accustomed to calling the old and new cities in Qidong "upper" and "lower".

Wang Xiao and his family lived there for more than ten years. In September 2018, Wang Xiao entered junior high school.

In the opinion of his uncle Liu Yong, the reason why Wang Xiao met these "sisters" was mainly because he "took the first wrong step" in junior high school.

When she was in the first grade of junior high school, she met Ye Hong, who was five years older than her, on a short video platform. Ye Hong was of medium height and thin, with bangs covering his eyebrows, and looked like a good boy. He was studying in a technical secondary school in Qidong, and the two soon started chatting online. Soon Ye Hong asked her if she wanted to be his girlfriend?

At that time, Wang Xiao's father had just died of a cerebral hemorrhage, but her mother Liu Ping did not understand her daughter's sensitive feelings.

Wang Xiao was born into a reconstituted family. Wang Er was a widower whose ex-wife left him with a son and a daughter. When Liu Ping was 42 years old, she and Wang Er gave birth to Wang Xiao and doted on him. But the good times didn't last long. Before Wang Xiao finished kindergarten, Wang Er became paralyzed and lost his ability to work.

In order to take care of Wang Er, Wang Xiao's family moved from the countryside to Qidong County and lived in a self-built building of Wang Er's son. The self-built building is six or seven stories high, dark and damp, with two rooms of about 20 square meters on both sides of each floor. Wang Xiao's family's bedrooms and kitchens are located on different floors.

They rent out the vacant floors at a price of one or two thousand yuan per year, and share the rest of the building with strangers. If the volume is high, the conversation on the first floor can be heard on the fourth or fifth floor. For Wang Xiao, the most common educational method used by his parents is beating and scolding.

Wang Xiao grew up in this building. During the past decade, Liu Ping did not work and was responsible for taking care of her father and daughter. Her half-sister, the eldest son, gave her 1,500 yuan a month for living expenses. This 1,500 yuan covered the family's food, clothing and his father's medicine. After his father passed away, the eldest son stopped the 1,500 yuan subsidy and only paid for Wang Xiao's tuition. Wang Xiao was always worried that one day she and her mother would be kicked out.

Wang Er's eldest son is nearly 30 years older than Wang Xiao, and his daughter is one year older than Wang Xiao. Wang Xiao remembers that her brother's family would return to Qidong during the Chinese New Year. Her brother's daughter repeatedly emphasized to her that this was not her home. She sometimes hated her parents and her family, "Why do we feel like we are living in someone else's home?"

Wang Xiao was not having a happy time at school.

In primary school, she had poor grades and didn't get along well with her classmates. She ranked at the bottom of a class that had nearly half of the students admitted to Qidong No. 1 Middle School. Her teacher said that the reason she was disobedient was "more due to family reasons."

Wang Xiao remembers that in elementary school, there were teachers who treated students differently based on their grades. To punish children who didn’t listen, the teacher would ask other students to dump the garbage from their desks in the corridor. Some students would deliberately tear up the paper and spit on it, “and then let us poor students pick it up with our hands.”

Wang Xiao finished elementary school. When she was in the sixth grade, her father passed away. After that, Wang Xiao felt lonely, "like she was lacking love." She thought that if she had a boyfriend, he would be able to accompany her and listen to her. She accepted Ye Hong's confession.

"He's like a liar, he never really listened to me," Wang Xiao said. After they started dating, every time she sent him a bunch of messages, he would just perfunctorily reply with one or two sentences. After school or on weekends, Ye Hong would invite Wang Xiao to his house. He lived in a town near Qidong County, and every time they took a bus for more than a dozen stops to go to his house, they never sat together. Ye Hong sat in the back row with his classmates, and Wang Xiao sat in the front row, pretending that they didn't know each other.

One afternoon in October 2018, the two had sex at Ye Hong's home. Wang Xiao said she didn't know how to refuse him, nor did she know what a hymen was. She was less than 12 years old at the time.

"Later, when I heard from my classmates, I realized what all this meant, and I began to feel unclean." After they had been dating for about a month, Ye Hong proposed breaking up.

In August 2020, before taking Ye Hong to court, Liu Yong contacted him and persuaded him to meet with his parents at the Qidong Police Station. Their chat records showed that Ye Hong had gone out to work after becoming an adult, and he had begged him not to tell his parents.

Ye Hong said that his parents treated him very badly. Because he did not want to go to a technical school, his parents rushed back from other places and beat him up. "I don't want to make them worry, and I don't want to contact them again. How much money do you want or what can be used to solve it? I can earn it myself, please."

Ye Hong was arrested by local police in June 2021 on suspicion of rape. In November of the same year, the Qidong County Procuratorate prosecuted him for suspected rape. As of press time, the case has not yet been heard.

3

playmate

After breaking up with Ye Hong, Wang Xiao completely lost interest in studying.

The world outside the school is colorful. She eats barbecue, bathes her feet, hangs out in nightclubs, sings at KTVs with her friends, and travels back and forth between the old and new city districts. She likes riding a shared electric bike at night the most. "For 3 yuan, I can go around the street several times. I feel so free."

Freedom is the adjective most often used by Wang Xiao and her playmates.

In a foot bath shop where the average per capita consumption is about 200 yuan, the Red Star News reporter met Wang Xiao's playmates, all of whom were around 16 years old, and some of them were girls who worked as hostesses in KTVs. Their parents went out to work, and they became left-behind children early. When they entered puberty, their grandparents were unable to discipline them, so they dropped out of school before finishing junior high school. Similar children are not uncommon in the local area.

▲Playmates spend nearly 200 yuan per person at a massage parlor

According to local media reports in November 2021, Qidong County is close to Guangdong Province. It is a large agricultural county, a large population county, and a large labor export county. There are 56,128 left-behind children in the compulsory education stage in the county, accounting for 54.53% of the total number of students in this stage.

The playmates called dropping out of school the only way to pursue freedom, "People like us can't learn from studying." Before they became adults, they had plenty of time to spend on the streets. However, freedom can also show another side that is dangerous and full of temptations. When people play for a long time, their hearts are easily contaminated by various desires.

Xiao Yang, who just got out of the juvenile detention center, told reporters that he had tasted the taste of money too early, "Others can buy this, but I don't have the money; others have money to go out and play, but I can only follow behind, if you don't have money you can't hold your head up." A playmate said that Xiao Yang and his girlfriend once spent 10,000 yuan in 11 days.

Xiao Yang's face is still young, with centipede-like scars on his forehead and arms. He helped others to support the show, fought with others, and engaged in telecom fraud to make money. After Xiao Yang was imprisoned, his parents rushed home. He said word by word: "Sometimes I hate why my parents are not around, but my parents only say, 'If I accompany you, I can't support this family.'"

"I don't even know what it feels like to be controlled by parents." Wang Xiao's best friend said. She lost her father when she was young, her mother remarried, and she lived with her grandparents. "But I know that if a child is not controlled well in junior high school, she will be finished."

After being "taught" by Pan Yujia in the second year of junior high school, Wang Xiao hated going to school more and more. After she skipped classes for more than a week, Liu Ping was at a loss and called her half brother and sister. They rushed back from Hengyang, confiscated Wang Xiao's phone, and her brother beat her up.

Afterwards, her sister took her to Hengyang City and separated her from her playmates in her hometown. Wang Xiao stayed at her sister's house for more than ten days. During this time, her sister found a closed-door school and sent her there to start from the first grade of junior high school.

But in Hengyang, Wang Xiao felt the same way again. Her sister is almost 40 years old and has already started a family with her own children. Although she knows her sister is good, she feels that she is not close to her, "It seems like we are not very familiar with each other." She can't even talk about her daily needs, let alone her inner thoughts, "I don't even dare to spend too much time in the toilet, I feel embarrassed."

The school also made her feel lonely and she couldn't communicate with her classmates. On the first weekend after she arrived, she borrowed a classmate's phone to send a message to her best friend, saying, "Come pick me up." Her best friend rushed to the school, and they secretly returned to Qidong.

Her sister refused to give up on her, and discussed with Liu Ping the plan to find a new school in Hengyang, with each of them paying part of the tuition.

Wang Xiao heard that the tuition fee would be about 10,000 yuan. She knew that her mother did not have a stable job and could not afford the expenses. "I know my mother has no money, and I don't have the heart to study anymore. It would be a waste to pay the money."

She ran away from home and hid at her best friend's house for a month, with only one thought in her mind: not to go to Hengyang.

The sister left disappointed because she didn't answer the phone or reply to messages. Liu Ping was extremely anxious and looked everywhere for her. She called Liu Yong back from the construction site to look for her together. Liu Yong couldn't find her no matter how hard he tried. He first called the police, then printed out photos of his niece and posted them everywhere.

After seeing this, Wang Xiao decided to leave immediately. She contacted a girl on the short video platform who worked as a hostess in a KTV in Zhuzhou. Wang Xiao asked if she could go to her place to play for a few days, and she said yes.

The girl lived in a hotel in Zhuzhou. On the first day she arrived in Zhuzhou, she booked a room for Wang Xiao in the same hotel. There was a floor in the hotel specifically for nightclub girls like her. There were three single beds in a room, put in a row, like a school dormitory. Wang Xiao also went to the KTV where the girl worked with her. There was a special dressing room in the KTV, and Wang Xiao sat inside and watched the girl put on makeup in front of the mirror. When the girl was working as a hostess, she watched her drinking with him through the door of the private room.

She didn't have enough money on her and wanted to earn some money to go home. The hostesses offered her 100 yuan per hour. She was tempted, thinking that being a hostess was nothing more than singing and drinking with the guests, and she didn't need to spend her body. She had seen people cleverly avoid drinking, "I feel that being a hostess is better than the previous (taking orders)."

▲Qidong County Street

4

Mother

August 12, 2020 was the third day that Wang Xiao was going to work as a hostess. In the afternoon, Liu Yong hurried to the entrance of a hotel in downtown Zhuzhou, Hunan, and the Internet police told him that there was a mobile phone signal for his niece Wang Xiao.

After learning about it, he rushed back to Qidong County, first calling the police and contacting the Women's Federation, then began to search the streets and alleys, posting missing person notices everywhere. He and his niece played a cat-and-mouse game, and he got her location several times, but when he arrived, she had already left.

This time, Wang Xiao's signal appeared near the Zhuzhou Hotel. He came over and reported Wang Xiao's name and ID card. The hotel staff told him that there was no such person here. He went to the hotel's security room again, handed cigarettes to the security guards, took out his niece's photo and asked them one by one.

A kind person told him that he seemed to have seen it, but he was not sure. The kind person said that every afternoon at 3 or 4 o'clock, there is a bus opposite the hotel to pick up a group of girls to work in the entertainment club, and you can go and have a look.

When Liu Yong walked across the street, a white Iveco just started its engine and the car body was buzzing. He rushed to the car window to stop it and told the driver that he wanted to get on the car to look for someone. The driver agreed. He searched row by row and found that more than a dozen seats were full of people, all of whom were fashionable girls, about 20 years old, wearing heavy makeup. When he was about to reach the last row, the girl sitting by the window suddenly lowered her head. He shouted angrily: "Wang Xiao, get off with me!"

He dragged his niece away and scolded her loudly. She had just turned 14 and was almost a hostess.

The driver waited for a while, and drove away from Liu Yong with a car full of girls. Liu Yong took her back to Qidong overnight. Thinking that Wang Xiao's mother was worried, he refused even when the Zhuzhou police asked him to go back to take a statement. On the way, he asked Wang Xiao why she ran away from home and "got angry", and she cried and told him that a few months ago she was forced by another underage girl to engage in prostitution in Qidong and was sexually assaulted by several adult men.

On the night when Wang Xiao was caught by her uncle, she found that her mother looked worried, but she didn't beat her like she used to. She just said that it was good that she was back.

As early as the first year of junior high school, Liu Ping could no longer control her daughter. "I have beaten her and scolded her." When her daughter was in boarding school, she was often told by the school that her daughter did not return to the dormitory. As soon as she received a call from the teacher, she went out to look for her daughter, walking all over the county. Sometimes her daughter did not return all night, and she waited anxiously. Later, Wang Xiao became a day student. Every time after school, she stood at the door and waited, but she could not get her daughter back.

Liu Ping remembered that her daughter said she was unhappy when she was in primary school and wanted to transfer to another school, but Liu Ping had no money and no job, and she had to stay at home to take care of her paralyzed husband. Wang Xiao finished primary school and went to junior high school in the old city, and then she had a series of experiences.

She still regrets it now. If she had the ability to send her daughter to a stricter school, would things have been different?

Until now, Liu Ping has been unable to discipline her daughter. When Liu Ping was fifteen or sixteen years old, her parents gave her to a man who was doing small business in the village. The man had a bad temper and would beat and scold her at any time. He also traded women with his friends. After their two daughters were killed, she finally escaped from the man.

Now, Wang Xiao is 14 years old and has her own ideas. After the unbearable past, Wang Xiao brought her boyfriend back home. The two families met and had a meal, which was considered as in-laws. At the banquet, Liu Ping entrusted her daughter to her adult boyfriend. Not long after the meal, Wang Xiao followed her boyfriend to another place, and the case was fully entrusted to Liu Yong.

At the end of December 2021, a reporter from Red Star News met Wang Xiao in a factory in a first-tier city. She was thin and small, wearing only a thin fleece sweater on a winter night. She tied her hair behind her head, and when she smiled, her eyebrows curved into a lovely arc.

She said that she now lives with her boyfriend, who treats her very well and knows her past experiences. He buys her breakfast and lets her manage his salary. "He is a very good person and I have feelings for him."

Every day, her boyfriend goes to work and she takes care of their lives in the rental house, which is very small and can only accommodate a 1.2-meter-wide bed and a yellow toilet.

She washed their clothes and hung them on wire hangers, arranging them neatly in the corner of the room. When she was alone, she would inadvertently think of the lingering past, "I would feel uncomfortable, so I would force myself not to think about it and quickly forget it."

Sometimes, she feels confused about the future, and she also knows that she can't always rely on others. Wang Xiao said that she plans to learn to do manicure to earn money and save money to buy a house. "Only my mother and I will be written on the property certificate."

(Due to the privacy of minors, all names in the article are pseudonyms)