The girl’s family have decided to terminate her pregnancy
An 11-year-old girl in Henan province was recently found to be pregnant, the victim of long-term sexual abuse and repeated rape by a school staff member.
Lele (alias) was born in 2006 to a father who is physically disabled and a mother who is mentally challenged. With her father working in the city as a migrant worker, she is mostly cared for by her mom and older sister.
Last month, Lele was taken to a local clinic after complaining about mounting physical discomforts. There, she was found to be five months pregnant, according to a report from news.k168.cn.
Upon questioning, the once outgoing and cheerful girl breathed only the word “teacher.” A slew of dark events that had been haunting her then began to finally come to light.
Lele attended the №2 Primary School in Magutian Village. In the fourth grade, a staff member surnamed Liu sexually assaulted her for the first time when she was only 9 years old, according to Zhang Jun, Lele’s brother-in-law, who went on to give more sickening details about what had happened to the little girl.
Zhang said that Lele was frolicking on the playground with two kids when Liu appeared. He promptly sent off the other two children and forcibly took Lele downstairs into the basement, gagged her, and raped her. He later threatened to “kill her family” if she dared utter a word of this to someone else.
Over the following two years, Lele was the victim of more sexual assaults and rapes. Liu even went so far as to stalk her to her home and knock on the door while her mother was there, under the pretense of borrowing some books. On that occasion, even Lele’s mom noticed that there was something wrong with the situation. Liu raped Lele in an abandoned building shortly afterwards.
Liu, now in his 50s, is married with children and had worked at the school for more than 5 years. His tenure there was described by school principal Chang Chunkui as “seemingly nothing irregular and totally normal.”
The principal maintained that he had no knowledge of what had been going on since nothing had ever been brought to his attention by either pupils or parents.
“He is not actually on the teaching staff,” Chang explained. “He’s a security officer at the school who is in charge of the students’ safety and discipline.”
Liu has been placed under custody while police wait for the result of a DNA test conducted earlier last month.
“Lele used to do great at school with fantastic grades and an outgoing, cheerful personality,” her brother-in-law told reporters. “But she’s grown more quiet in the past two years.”
Lele’s aunt said that after she was found to be pregnant, Lele became even more silent. Before being contacted by reporters, she said that no one from either the school or the suspect’s family had reached out to them.
On the day following the first report of Lele’s story, news.k168.cn reported that her family had decided to terminate the girl’s pregnancy.
The horrifying story of what had happened to Lele whipped up a firestorm of outrage and disgust on Chinese social media last week. “Emasculate him!” wrote one Weibo user, referring to Liu. “So many child abuse cases, how come no one is doing anything about the relevant laws?” another chimed in.
This shocking incident comes on the heels of a series of explosive cases regarding child abuse at learning centers in China. Back in November, a teacher at a nursery used by Ctrip employees in Shanghai was caught on surveillance camera shoving kids around and force feeding them wasabi to keep them quiet.
Later that month, even more explosive allegations surfaced at a private Beijing kindergarten. In the end, police declared that parents had made up salacious stories about teachers drugging and sexually abusing kids, but confirmed that one staff member had, in fact, punished children by pricking them with sewing needles.
Those two scandals managed to catch the whole country’s attention — occurring in China’s two most important cities to children of the middle class. However, incidences of child abuse occur even more frequently out in the Chinese countryside, where they are all too often simply overlooked or go unreported.