Beijing: China's rural areas have over 61 million "left behind" children with a "motherless village" accounting for 132 abandoned kids, highlighting the plight as they are neglected by their parents in pursuit of jobs in cities, even as reports said girls living in such conditions are most vulnerable to sexual offences.
Huangjing village in central China's Hunan province's Shaoyang County has 132 kids living without their mothers earning the "motherless village" tag. It once again puts the spotlight on the problem of migrant-workers' children, or what are called "left-behind children", in China, state-run People's Daily reported on Sunday.
All these 132 children are school-age kids with oldest ones attending middle school. Around 116 are motherless because their mothers either remarried or simply left home without returning while the mothers of the rest passed away, the report said.
Most of the kids in Huangjing village do not remember how their mothers look like or only have a glimpse of their appearances. In the absence of mothers' care, these children suffer from even emotional traumas.
China has over 260 million migrant labours who, over the past few decades, served as cheap labour for the world's second largest economy's unprecedented economic growth, as per last year's official estimates.
China has 61 million "left behind" Children in rural areas whose parents have gone to cities in search of work while leaving them with grand parents or relatives, a recent study by the All China Women's Foundation, an official body, said.
Around 30 million children under 18 years of age have no parents at home and two million fend for themselves with no adult guardian, according to the study.
Left-behind girls are most vulnerable to sexual offences in less developed regions, and migrant girls or children of migrant workers face higher chances of assault in developed areas, a report of the joint study by the China Children and Teenagers' Fund and the Research Centre for Philanthropy and Social Enterprise under Beijing Normal University said.
Chunhua and her younger sister Guihua's father is somewhere far away from home working as a migrant-worker and come back home only once a year or every two years. Luckily, they have their grandma with them. Since she is very old, the only thing she can do is to make sure that the girls have something to eat every day. "I only want to grow up soon and to go to somewhere to make money," Chunhua said.
Last month, China was shocked by suicide of four children, aged between five and 13, highlighting the tragedy of those left behind in the rural areas when their parents move to the cities to find work.
The four siblings died after being found unconscious in their home in Guizhou province, one of China's poorest regions. Police said their father left home to find work in Guangdong province after their mother had left home.
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