They are the legal guardians of their children, but they do not know where their children are, because the biological father hid them, so they are not considered missing, and this is not a crime.
They are trapped in an endless search.
No Solution
When Qiao Guiling left Guangzhou on September 8, the rain had been falling for several days and she had to give up after six days of searching in the rain with no luck. This was Qiao Guiling’s 945th day of searching for her child. “Son, Mommy misses you so much! Mom was looking for you in Guangzhou, but couldn’t find you! “On the train back to Zhengzhou, she wrote in a personal account visible only to herself.
On February 2, 2018, Qiao Guiling had a heated confrontation with her husband, who had cheated on her at the time, and his family, and wanted to leave the house with her children, but they did not allow her to do so, and the standoff resulted in Qiao Guiling leaving alone. To this day, she has not been allowed to see her children again. At the end of that year, she filed for divorce and received custody of her son, but in return, her ex-husband’s family disappeared completely. She was working for a famous sports brand in Zhengzhou, but she quit her job to have time to file a lawsuit and find her children. Her ex-husband’s hometown is in the countryside of Nanyang, and she purposely opened a brand franchise in downtown Nanyang. For two years, finding them was the main thing in her life.
Before going to Guangzhou, Qiao Guiling went to her ex-husband’s home (which she visits twice a month). The gate to the courtyard was locked, and the house was still empty, along with her elderly parents, who had disappeared. There was a huge persimmon tree by the wall, growing out from the courtyard, with boughs full of persimmons that were beginning to turn yellow. Before she left, she knocked down all the persimmons she could reach with a stick and crushed them with her feet to make herself feel better.
She guessed that they had taken the child to their relatives. The child’s aunt had a steady job and was the only place she could find an address. She retrieved the company name on a map and checked into a nearby hotel. Like a private detective, she did not rush to find her target for the first two days, but rather familiarized herself with the environment, looking around, for example, to see if there was a place nearby where her children went to school, and then chose the most suitable location for her crouch, right across the street from the building where her aunt’s company was located, not too close for fear of being recognized. There were no small stores to set up store in, so she had to stand at the edge of the street with her umbrella, staring at the people coming in and out of the door across the street. She carried some yogurt and bread with her, and when she was still hungry, she ordered a take-out. From 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., she stood there, staring until her eyes glazed over.
Four days later, at 8:00 a.m., Qiao Guiling saw what appeared to be her child’s aunt’s back in the stream of people going to work. Wearing a mask, she followed the suspect to the elevator, where he turned around and saw her face to face.
Qiao Guiling felt that she might be recognized and panicked, but she suddenly said, “Do you have time? “
“Were you looking for me? ” the other side asked.
“Yes. “
“I don’t know you. “Apparently, the child’s aunt didn’t recognize her. Qiao Guiling subconsciously turned her head and fled, hearing the other party still chasing after her, “Who the hell are you, I really don’t know you. Qiao Guiling was too flustered to know why she was running away.
She really only wanted to secretly confirm one thing – whether the child was with her aunt. They weren’t the kind of relationship to sit down and talk. She continued to wait downstairs, and at the end of the day, she took a taxi, originally wanting to follow them to their residence. The next morning, she went to wait again, but no one came out of the building. This time, she felt that she had been reckless, and that the other party had probably noticed her and deliberately avoided her. Frustrated and blaming herself, she bought a ticket home with a broken heart.
It was as if she was the one who had made the mistake. The search had been clandestine, and that was all she could do. Because as soon as they knew she had found them, they would move, as they had done for the past two years, and all their efforts would be in vain, and things would be back to square one.
Legally, there is no specific term to explain the predicament Qiao Guiling is going through. She is the legal guardian of her child, but she doesn’t know where the child is, and because the biological father hid the child, the child is not considered missing, nor does such behavior constitute a crime.
Zhang Jing, deputy director of the Marriage and Family Committee of the Beijing Lawyers Association, made a statistic that out of more than 700 randomly selected judgments related to divorce, custody, and visitation, 11% were similar to Qiao Guiling’s. The vast majority of them were women, some were not allowed to see their children, and some had their children snatched away from them and then disappeared. Some have had their children taken away from them as soon as they were born, some have been separated from their children for more than six years, and some have found their children after a few years when they had already claimed them as their own. They call this phenomenon “snatching and hiding” (abbreviated as snatching/hiding), and according to known cases, it happens when the child is young.
It’s not a new phenomenon, but it’s easily overlooked. Their encounters are dissolved by the label of “marital disputes”. When a child is taken/hidden, they are likely to lose a custody case for the “need to maintain a stable living environment for the child” reason; even if they are awarded custody or a child in custody, they are likely to lose the case. Visitation rights are not successfully enforced, and current legal enforcement measures are insufficient to protect their rights.
Their predicament seems to be an unsolvable puzzle. The snatchers/hunters take advantage of legal ambiguities and traditional beliefs to set up a trap, and the difficulties are intertwined to form a closed bureau that leaves them with nothing to do. They appeal, litigate, search, and stalk to get their children back, and some even resort to reverse snatching in a desperate attempt to get their children back, leaving them to live in the shadows forever.
Snatching
Robberies always happen suddenly, with premeditation on the part of the robber, and the person being robbed is often unprepared and unaware of the situation. After the robbery, people don’t think they will “lose” their children, thinking it is just a temporary dispute that will be resolved somehow.
This is unheard of in her 30 years of simple life experience. In March of this year, Wang Xiaoslide planned to take her one-and-a-half-year-old son to the hospital for treatment of his O-leg. Her husband had been away from home for 13 months at the time, and her son had been raised by Wang Xiaoslide.
Because her husband had taken her son’s papers, she had to call him to bring them to her. The husband showed up on time, and for the first time since the separation, he was submissive and cooperative. He told Wang Xiaolian that this hospital might be inaccurate and to check with another, better hospital. He suggested that we should split up, with Wang riding her electric car first and taking a taxi with the children herself. Without giving it much thought, Wang Xiaoslide left her son with her husband. The child, who was only a few months old when he last saw his father, reached out to her in tears and shouted “Mama” before we parted.
The first thing he said was that he had taken the child to Zhengzhou to see a doctor, then he said his phone was running out of battery, and then he turned it off. The first thing you need to know is that you can’t find any of them, and you can’t find them.
During her husband’s absence, she repeatedly sent messages to him, begging him to come home, but he did not respond. At one point, she was determined to get a divorce, but her parents advised her that it was best not to get a divorce, even though she would be alone with the child, “at least the child has a nominal father. “Wang Xiaoslide felt reasonable, and softened her heart. So that day, when her husband agreed to come to the hospital to deliver the child’s papers, Wang Xiaolian was very happy, in her understanding, this is a sign of her husband’s intention to return to the family.
After that separation, Wang Xiaoslip never saw her children again. She called the police, but they were still married, and the issue of the child was an internal family dispute, not a security dispute. She went to her husband’s hometown to look for the children and was kicked out by the other parent. She reported her husband’s misbehavior to the school and the Department of Education, and after the school suspended him, he stopped showing up at school. She sued for divorce, and because her husband refused, the court denied her a divorce (and is now suing again). When she had no other choice, she went to the school with a sign and held a “sit-in” in front of the school, but when she was warned that it was illegal, she dared not go again. She has always been an honest person who doesn’t break the rules.
Every day, Wang Xiaoslide posts a number in her circle of friends, which is the number of days her child has been away from her, and it’s now 244.
Wang Jianna’s child was “snatched” directly from her. She and her “husband” had a wedding, but the “husband” was not the only one who had a child. The two of them were separated when the child was 4 months old, and Wang Jianna went back to her mother’s house to live. When the child was 4 months old, the two separated, and Wang Jianna returned to her mother’s home to live.
The first time I saw her was when I was a child, I thought it was a good idea for her to go home. Wang Jianna replied, “Let’s take out the birth certificate of your child first, and then we’ll talk about it in the hukou. She did not reply again. The next day, Wang Jianna and her mother went out to go home, just parked the car in the parking space, holding the child ready to go upstairs, the man with a dozen relatives and friends rushed over, a few people Wang Jianna mother and daughter pressed on the ground, another person from her hands quickly snatched the child, and ran away. The entire process was recorded on the neighborhood’s surveillance camera.
Wang Jianna was at a loss as to what to do when they snatched her without warning. It was only after she found a locator in her car’s safety deposit box that she realized that the precise snatching of her child was the result of a premeditated plan.
The judicial interpretation of the Supreme Law states: “Children under two years of age generally live with their mothers. The fact that a child under the age of two weeks who is snatched/hidden is eventually returned to the mother seems to be a non-negligible outcome.
The day after the child was snatched away, Wang Jianna went to consult with a legal aid lawyer: Will I get custody if the child is still breastfeeding? But they didn’t hesitate to answer: No, the child will be awarded to whomever has it. “I thought it was unbelievable,” said Wang Jianna. ” said Jianna Wang.
The final result confirmed the lawyer’s experience. The judgment in the custody case reads, “Because the child is still young, his living environment should not be easily changed, so this court believes that it is appropriate for the defendant to raise him. Wang Jianna’s custody case was lost in both the first and second trials.
His predecessor was sentenced to 10 years of administrative detention and a fine of 500 RMB for beating Wang Jianna and her mother during the fight for the child.
Zhang Jing explained to me the causal chain that led to this result: Firstly, custody is a personal relationship dispute, and the object of enforcement is the child. Under this premise, “the trial court will consider the objective status quo of whether enforcement can be achieved. In order to resolve this conflict, the trial court will consider how to avoid it in advance, so it will overwhelmingly consider which party will have custody of the child. This is a convenient way for judges to reduce enforcement conflicts in judicial decisions”. In addition, when deciding on custody, the custody judgments mention the need to consider the child’s stable living relationship, living environment, and parenting style, a principle that justifies the above decision. Therefore, “judges usually ask who the child is with, and they will use this as an important reference for custody decisions, without going into the details of why the child is on that side. And there is no relevant law that requires more in-depth investigation. “Zhang Jing said.
Kitchen, four years ago, her daughter’s leftover rice noodles are still in the cupboard, has been growing worms, Wang Jianna can not afford to lose, is a thought.
Now her daughter is already a 4 1/2-year-old girl, but Wang Jianna’s memory of her, still stuck in the 6 months wrapped in swaddling clothes. In September of this year, in the custody modification court she was suing, her ex provided her with several photos of her child in her current state, wearing large sunglasses and not showing her full face. She copied them down and put them on her phone, and when she showed them to me, she kept pointing at the screen, trying to find traces of herself in the pictures: the caterpillar toy in the corner, which she bought at that time; the checkered bed sheet, which she also bought and still uses; and the downward-pointing mouth, which looks similar to the one she had when she was a child.
After droning on for a while, she put down her phone, looked blankly at the window, as if waking up from a dream after being slapped, and said, “I don’t recognize my daughter. “
Violence
In the cases we have come across, snatching/hiding behavior is sometimes closely related to domestic violence. According to Jing Zhang’s statistics, domestic violence occurs in more than 50% of the cases where children are snatched and hidden. When one party gets rid of the control through legal dissolution of the wedding ceremony, and the other party still wants to control further, the only tangible thing that can be grabbed is the children. So grabbing/hiding the child, making the other person beg for it, and retaliating, is also a form of control. “
In Wang Jianna’s account, when she was five months pregnant, the man dragged her, who was lying on the ground, from the third floor stairs to the second floor (they live in a three-story townhouse) because of a verbal argument. At the time, she did not realize that she was experiencing domestic violence. In her cognition, the real hands-on occurred during the month, Wang Jianna let the other party to go downstairs to help her get a diaper, he was not happy, bring it to fall on her face, the two quarreled, the other party began to slap her, left a slap right a slap, slap to the housecoat stained with runny nose blood. The third time, he pulled Wang Jianna’s hair and threw her back and forth, then threw her on the sofa, then kicked her.
–Wang Jianna didn’t keep any evidence or report the incident to the police, and she didn’t even mention it to her mother’s family at one point. “I thought I was married to him, and I had a child. “Until the third time the violence occurred, Wang Jianna couldn’t stand it any longer and took her children back to her mother’s house.
Dai Xiaolei also suffered from domestic violence. She is a film art director, has participated in the production of “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon 2”, “Transformers 4”, “The Great Wall”. After graduating from graduate school, she moved to China to pursue her career. She met Liu Tao (a pseudonym), a Hebei native who is a martial arts instructor for a TV series, and they married in 2009.
Two years after the birth of his son, Liu Tao participated in the filming of a costume drama, which was a big hit, and his value in the community rose. Dai Xiaolei discovered that Liu Tao was very different from what he had found before, became irritable, and began to commit domestic violence against Dai Xiaolei. Once, Liu Tao’s cheating object to her to play provocative phone calls, she went to Hengdian to ask Liu Tao to go back to Beijing with himself, in Hangzhou airport, Liu Tao gave her a punch in public, Dai Xiaolei’s eyes were hit with bruises, after the police Liu Tao was administratively punished 200 yuan.
In August 2014, Dai Xiaolei sued Liu Tao for the first time, applying for divorce and child custody. At that time, his son had been forcibly taken back to his hometown in Hebei by Liu Tao’s parents to take care of him for nearly a year. From the beginning of the lawsuit, they did not allow Dai Xiaolei to visit the child again.
Violence continued during the lawsuit, and on April 2, 2017, after three years of not being allowed to see the child, Liu Tao agreed for the first time to allow Dai Xiaolei to visit the child in his hometown of Baoding, Hebei Province. At the end of the hour-long visit, Liu Tao again punched and kicked Dai Xiaolei. The worst violence during the custody case took place in Beijing. Dai Xiaolei remembers when she went to buy breakfast at a bun store downstairs, across the street from their former neighborhood, Chaoyang Gome City. Liu Tao dragged her out of the bakery by her hair, and according to the bakery owner’s testimony to Dai Xiaolei afterwards – he tried to stop her, but Liu Tao said back: “What do you care if I beat my own wife? Liu Tao dragged Dai Xiaolei, who was lying on the ground, from the store to the other side of the street. After Dai Xiaolei struggled to stand up, he grabbed her by the neck and dragged her back upstairs.
The most impressive detail was that she begged for help, but no one answered her, and there was a line of delivery people waiting to take orders sitting next to the street.
In 2015, Liu Tao filed a divorce suit against Dai Xiaolei, and in May 2016, a judgment was issued awarding Liu Tao custody of the children. Liu Tao was sentenced to compensate Dai Xiaolei 5,000 yuan for the emotional loss she suffered as a result of the domestic violence she committed against Dai Xiaolei during her marriage.
Dai Xiaolei could not accept the verdict. The evidence she submitted regarding Liu Tao’s infidelity and domestic violence was completely overwritten by the requirement to “maintain a stable living environment for the child. In other words, the child was awarded to whichever party she was with at the time. Dai Xiaolei did not understand and could not accept this set of logic.
How did this set of logic come about?
In a paper titled “Exploring the Impact of Domestic Violence on Child Custody Attribution”, the author explains the relationship between domestic violence and custody in Chinese law. According to the author, in China’s Marriage Law, the term “domestic violence” does not appear in the legal articles related to the attribution of child custody. In the current state of legislation, there is no connection between domestic violence and child custody. “
Ma Yinan, a professor at Peking University Law School, explained to us: “The most important principle in a custody decision is that it should benefit the physical and mental health of the minor child. ‘Most favorable’, usually at the discretion of the judge, will take more into account the psychological dependence of the minor, and believe that domestic violence between husband and wife, rather than domestic violence against children, will have a much weaker impact on the parent-child relationship. In the current legal system, it has not been clearly correlated whether infidelity and domestic violence, which are personal qualities, are detrimental to the interests of children. “
At the beginning of the divorce proceedings, Dai Xiaolei kept asking himself, “Is this really necessary? Can we give him another chance? What did I do wrong? She had no idea how to go on with her life. When she wasn’t working, she rode her bicycle from the East 4th Ring to the West 4th Ring and back again.
After two years, she came to terms with reality and gave herself an answer: my marriage had failed, and my mistake was that I had found the wrong person, but the good thing was that I didn’t choose to live with it. She stopped working, and because her Chinese language skills were not very good, she recruited two bilingual assistants to form a studio, and hired the famous lawyer who helped Li Yang’s ex-wife Kim win the custody case, to deal with the lawsuit wholeheartedly.
After losing the first and second custody trial and the case against the High Court, Dai Xiaolei went on to fight the “visitation rights” and the “custody case”. The “change of custody” lawsuit cost more than a million dollars over the course of six years and seven lawsuits in total. Except for visitation rights, all the other cases were lost.
Judgments that are difficult to enforce
But even if we get custody, will it be easier to get the child back?
In late 2018, Qiao Guiling won her custody case. She attributed her luck to her ex-husband’s arrogance, and in court, Qiao Guiling surprised him by presenting evidence of her infidelity and her family’s verbal abuse. The judge, who had not yet left the courtroom, heard this and paid the price for his words.
Before the lawsuit was filed, the ex-husband and his parents were still living in the house they had rented with their children. They didn’t allow Qiao Guiling to come in to see the children, and she missed them so much that she hid in the supermarket in front of the neighborhood, where she could see through the glass the people coming in and out of the door, expecting them to sneak a few peeks when they came down for a walk with the children. Then she found the perfect spot, on the same floor of the building next to theirs, where she could clearly see what was going on in that house through the hallway windows.
For a while, she rode the bus for an hour and a half after work every day and went to the window to look across the street. She watched him run around the room with a lot of energy, happy and sad. She stood from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. before she went home. At the time, she thought that if she won the custody case, this would be the end of it.
But they moved away during the court case, and Qiao Guiling began the difficult search. Through a tip from a friend, she once found a neighborhood where she chartered a private car and parked it in front of the neighborhood when she left work, spying on the people coming in and out to see if her ex-husband and his family were there. On weekends, she would sit on a bench in front of the community for a whole day, expecting to see them out and about as if she were buying a lottery ticket. Until June 28th of this year, when Qiao Guiling went to the neighborhood for the last time and didn’t wait for anyone, “They probably don’t live here anymore,” she admitted in despair. “They probably don’t live here anymore,” she admitted in despair.
In July 2019, Huang Yifei’s relationship with the child’s mother broke down and he decided to separate. The child, who was over two years old, had been in the mother’s custody and they had been separated for many years. The child’s mother was convicted of fraud and was imprisoned for being pregnant and giving birth, and for the same reason, custody of the child was eventually awarded to Huang Yifei. After the verdict came down, the mother was unwilling to give up her child and lost track of her, and Huang Yifei went to the city where she lived and looked for her four times, but could not find her. After applying for enforcement, the court gave Huang Yifei the same answer: “I can’t find anyone”.
For this situation, can not say that the current law is no way. Professor Ma Yinan of Peking University Law School explained: “If you refuse to implement the court’s decision, do not return custody or do not cooperate with the other party’s visitation, you can follow the obstruction of civil litigation treatment, the treatment is usually to limit high consumption, fines or detention (up to 15 days). “These coercive measures are also the most common means used by courts today.
Coercive measures are useful for some people. After applying for custody enforcement, Chen Le cooperated with the judge to find her ex-husband, who did not want to return the child, and the judge detained him in court and warned him that if he persisted in not cooperating, he might be sentenced later for resisting enforcement. The ex-husband was still reluctant to cooperate at first, but after being detained for some time, he became frightened and finally agreed to let the court and Chen Le take the child back.
In early 2020, the court summoned Qiao Guiling’s ex-husband and gave him one month to hand over the child, citing “the child is not around” as the reason. After 15 days, she was released and the matter was settled. As for where the children are, the other party didn’t say, and the court couldn’t do anything, but told her that she could apply for enforcement again.
China’s Criminal Law has a “crime of refusing to comply with a judgment or ruling,” which theoretically applies to the situation they encountered. There have been a handful of successful convictions for the crime of refusing to obey a ruling in robbery/hiding cases. According to media reports, a mother named YingYing in Xiamen, after applying for custody enforcement, the man was detained and still did not cooperate, after which the court sentenced him to 1 year and 6 months in prison for the crime of refusing to comply with a judgment or ruling. But such cases are rare.
“If we look at the charge in detail, the Supreme People’s Court has given an enumerated explanation for this, and every item is related to property. Is it a crime for the other party to maliciously hide the child? It is not mentioned inside. “Zhang Jing explained to us. Another problem is: “The crime of refusal to enforce the law has a violent resistance, but it only applies when there is an active conflict, hiding and disappearing is a passive response and cannot be convicted. “In public judgments, we can see that the same cases of custody refusal have been punished in some provinces and not in others,” depending entirely on the The judge’s personal beliefs. “Zhang Jing said.
I accompanied Dai Xiaolei to court once, and she applied for enforcement of her visitation rights, agreeing to meet with her child in court. Each enforcement application process takes half a year, so she met with her child in six-month increments, and since 2014, she has met with her child a total of seven times. Liu Tao did not bring her child to the court that day, and the reason he gave was that “the child was sick, from the National Day fever to now, it’s really pitiful”. The judge made Liu Tao sign an agreement that he would allow Dai Xiaolei to see his children twice a month – an agreement that had been written many times before.
Liu Tao denied that he would not allow Dai Xiaolei to see his children. He neither refused nor replied to the messages Dai Xiaolei sent to set up a time to see his children. Several times he replied – for example, on February 22, 2019, at 8:38 a.m., Dai Xiaolei sent a message to Liu Tao: I am ready to see our son this Saturday (February 23, 2019) at 10 a.m. Please confirm, thank you. Liu Tao didn’t reply that day, but the next day (February 23rd) at 9:43 am, Liu Tao sent a message: I’ll be at the appointed place right away, see you later. Dai Xiaolei was in Guangzhou at the time, but had not left for Hebei the day before because she did not have his confirmation, so she lost her chance.
After leaving the court, we went to a nearby law firm for a consultation. The lawyer shook his head after the briefing and said, “Nothing can be done,” he said. He believed that Dai Xiaolei did not have any hope of winning the custody modification case, while the enforcement of visitation rights, as long as the other party did not cooperate, the court could not do anything. “The law is sometimes very cold-blooded, and sometimes very humane. That’s the awkward part. ”
“Am I the only one who can get him back? “Dai Xiaolei asked desperately.
“It’s a method. ” he nodded meaningfully.
Get it back?
There seemed to be no other way.
In September 2019, Zhao Yang and her husband negotiated a divorce. Zhao Yang’s husband agreed to leave his one-year-old child with Zhao Yang, as long as she allowed him to visit her occasionally. Everything was negotiated. The next day, the child’s father said he was going to take the child downstairs to sunbathe in the morning, but then he took the child back to his home in Shanxi and lost track of her. Like some mothers, she tried to “get” her child back through enforcement, but failed.
In April of this year, she finally found her child’s residence and notified the enforcement judge to come with her. The enforcement judge told her to wait outside the door and come in alone to negotiate. Because the child’s grandmother refused to hand over the child, after 40 minutes of stalemate, the judge had no choice but to leave. On that occasion, Zhao Yang did not get a chance to come in and take a look at the child.
Zhao Yang is an extreme athlete who has always been bold and heroic in life. After the enforcement failed, she immediately decided to change her strategy and get her child back by herself.
The other party moved out of the house, but Zhao Yang found her again. In the morning of May 11, 2020, Zhao Yang saw the grandparents pushing the child out of the house again, the weather was fine, the child was put in the stroller and not held in her hands, Zhao Yang decided it was the perfect time. She and her friend rushed over, and her friend held her grandparents back, and she snatched the child from the cart and ran into the car that was waiting for her, driving south from Shanxi to Nanjing.
After returning to Guangzhou, Zhao Yang moved home. She said her child was a clingy baby who might be insecure and needed her company at all times, so she quit her job and took care of him full-time. Currently, her life is quite peaceful, and she is living the kind of life she wants to spend with her child.
Zhao Yang is one of the few in this group. The issue between robbing and not robbing is extremely complicated. Everyone considered this option, but most of them didn’t have the courage to implement it in the end.
If the money spent on the lawsuit had been spent on this, you might have succeeded. “Many people have said this to Dai Xiaolei. It’s not that she hadn’t thought about it; she and her son are both Canadian nationals, and that’s a plus. Dai Xiaolei’s concerns were threefold: First, Liu Tao was a martial arts practitioner, and it would be difficult for her to confront her opponent. Second, hiding back in Canada meant that she would have to give up her career in China, which she had been developing for decades, and why should she give up everything when it was the other party who was at fault? She was not happy. The third and most important point is that her son is 8 years old, he knows everything, and what kind of psychological impact will it leave on him to experience another violent robbery? Dai Xiaolei could not answer this question.
On October 25, by means of enforcement, Dai Xiaolei met his son in Baoding, Hebei Province. The last time she saw him was in May. She brought her son his favorite stuffed bear and a board game. When she approached him, he would run away and she would chase after him, asking him to play with her for a while. The son doesn’t call her mom. In his life, he refers to his aunt – who is in her 40s and single – as his mother and assumes the role of caregiver. Dai Xiaolei once printed out a photo of her and her son when they were young and showed it to him, telling him that she was his mother.
“There’s no reasoning with a woman like you,” her son said. The son used such language to judge her. When Dai Xiaolei doesn’t do what he says, he throws everything on the ground or throws it in her face. Dai Xiaolei noticed that her son’s teeth were black and that he was wearing thick glasses at only eight years old, and she was worried. Every time she visited her son, she always wanted to take him to piano practice and play the drums, as if that would make a difference.
If the child’s whereabouts were found, what would be the next step? Qiao Guiling did not know. But she knew very well that if they got the child back, they would have to live in secrecy and worry about each other all the time. The fight. “It’s the children who suffer from all the fighting. Qiao Guiling was trying to remain rational in her story, but here she couldn’t help but cry.
Zhang Jing once came across a case in which a mother violently snatched her eight-year-old child back and brought him to live in the United States. She found that the child had grown up with an inability to handle intimate relationships properly, like a bird in a trap. How much impact will it have on a child’s development if he or she does not feel respected and safe in childhood due to the snatching/hiding behavior between parents? We do not yet have an adequate sample to explain this. But just from this one case, we can see that this kind of violation is hidden and lengthy. “Zhang Jing said.
During the lawsuit, Dai Xiaolei connected people with similar experiences and founded a public service organization called “Purple Ribbon Mother’s Love”. The organization’s current director, Julie Zhu, is experiencing the same dilemma, but says the organization doesn’t want its members to enforce their right to be with their children by robbing them, and she deliberately warns the organization when the moms can’t wait any longer and the robberies rise. “It’s a vicious cycle. We want the law to protect us. “
They recount encounters on the Internet, popularize the snatching/hiding of children phenomenon, organize public lectures, and constantly call for the improvement of relevant laws. “This is how we can get things really resolved,” said Julie. “Zhu Li said. They tossed to contact the National People’s Congress Zhang Bao Yan, during the two sessions of this year, Zhang Bao Yan in an interview, openly mentioned snatching / hiding the harm caused to children, calling for legislation to protect children’s affectionate rights. This is the first time the issue of child snatching/hiding has been raised by NPC deputies. Julie feels that their efforts have finally taken a small step forward.
Ma Yinan, who participated in the revision of the new Civil Code in 2020, mentioned that in Article 24 of the Law on the Protection of Minors, the latest addition is that “custody shall not be contested by means of snatching or hiding minor children. “The rules. However, the penalties for this act are not detailed. “Originally, in our draft proposal, after this provision, it was written that for the consequences of possession, the court would rule against it in its decision. But that wasn’t adopted,” Ma said. “Ma Yinan said. “Because it’s really hard to operate a judgment that involves personal relationships, right? “
In her search for her child, Qiao Guiling was successful only once. She went to her ex-husband’s hometown twice a month, and on one occasion, a neighbor in the village told her that the child was being taken to the hospital by his grandparents. She rushed there and saw the child. Under police protection, she was given a half hour with her son.
Her two-year-old son smiled when he saw her, she reached out to hug him, and he didn’t reject her. As the grandmother scolded her, the son raised his little hand to stop her, “You’re so little and you know how to protect your mother! “Qiao Guiling was so excited that she burst into tears. She opened her shopping app and let her son pick out his favorite toy, and he chose an electric puppy. “You’ll give it to him next time you come. “That’s what they told her at the time. Now that the puppy was still at home, a relative’s child came and tried to unwrap it and play with it, and she hastily put it away and hid it in a high place.
In hindsight, she could have taken advantage of the opportunity to take the baby by force. It was a perfect opportunity. But why didn’t she even think about it at the time?
“I just want to come and see the child and be with him. Even if I have to take them away, I want them to give them to me willingly, and I’m taking them away righteously. “Qiao Guiling said that deep down inside she had always felt that way.
She is waiting for that day to come.
◦ In the text, Liu Tao and Zhao Yang are pseudonyms.
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