Last Updated on 2020-01-21 , 11:13 pm
So kids are kidnapping themselves these days.
A little while ago, we talked about a rather complicated case with a 15-year-old scammed into staging his own kidnapping in order to squeeze money out of his parents to cancel a fake warrant.
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This case is rather more straightforward, but also a little bit sadder.
Well, a lot sadder, actually.
What Happened
On 8 May, a 13-year-old boy was found in an abandoned truck in a residential community in Luzhou, Sichuan province, bound and gagged.
In the police report lodged (ie the story the boy crafted), he explained that he had passed out after being sprayed with something at a crossroad. When he came to, he was already in the van with no memory of anything in between.
He was reportedly unharmed with nothing stolen. The police found no traces of the kidnapper either, and of course, all this makes sense now.
It took “a long talk” with the police officers about his family for the boy to come clean.
“I missed dad and mum”
The boy’s parents were migrant workers, far away in a distant part of the country. He had not seen them since the Lunar New Year (that’s about 3 months).
In the meantime, he lived with his grandparents who he doesn’t see much of either since his grandfather takes odd jobs while his grandmother toils in the fields.
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So, he staged his own abduction to make his parents come home because he knew asking them to return (through the phone) wouldn’t work. There’s no news if this worked either.
“Left-Behind” Children
This is far from an isolated case and it happens all over the world. In China alone, there are around 286 million migrant workers leaving rural parts for cities. Parents often have no choice but to leave their children in the hands of their relatives, seeing them only a few times a year.
And I’m not sure how old our readers are or if they remember how it’s like to be a child or a young teen but separation at that age can be very distressing.
A self-kidnapping may seem drastic, but you can imagine it’s within the realm of rationale in the mind of the child because of the anguish they feel.
This reaction is not easy on the parents either. They know how necessary it is to leave, but because their children can’t grapple that, it’s heartaches all around.
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The attempts to make them stay must be very frustrating as well. This isn’t even the first left-behind child self-kidnapping case in recent years, and there are and will be indubitably more drastic methods employed, just as there are milder versions.
After all, what can these parents do? Money is fundamentally important, anyone who says it’s not has too much of it.
Conclusion
Spare a thought for all who had to leave their families behind to find better career opportunities.
And till they are older and better able to cope, all the best to the families with left-behind children.
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