Rural Chinese children increasingly risk being sold orforced to become beggars, petty thieves or sex workers as their farmer parentsflock to cities looking for work, an international rights group said.
The government says that it has cracked down harshly on such cases, and thatthe trend is decreasing.
But Kate Wedgwood, Save the Children's country director for China and NorthKorea,said there are no reliable figures for the number of children being traffickedand the continued mass migration from farms to cities is sure to make theproblem worse.
"We already know the risks (of child trafficking) are exacerbated bymigration, so I think the likelihood is that it will increase," she said.
In recent years, an estimated 150 million to 200 million people have movedfrom the countryside to urban areas where their labor in factories and onconstruction sites has fueled
Several hundred million more are expected to leave
Poor rural children from ethnic communities are the most atrisk because they have limited command of Mandarin Chinese and often don't knowtheir rights, Wedgwood said. Disabled kids and children of parents with HIV/AIDSalso face increased risk of being trafficked and are sometimes forced intopanhandling.
She estimated that there are tens of thousands of boys from far western
Ethnic minority girls from
Children left behind in villages are vulnerable because they are oftenlooked after by grandparents — who often need care themselves — or byinstitutions that lose track of the children.
However, those who migrate with their parents are also in danger becausethey are thrust into unfamiliar surroundings with limited social services, andtheir parents are often busy working.
Wedgwood wants