China has been hit by a series of shocking murders of young girls by boys as young as 12 years old.
But just as shocking is how communist countries treat juvenile murderers, who are usually released without any prison time.
Often they are simply sent to a psychiatric hospital for a few years. In one case, the murderer was allowed to return to school immediately after committing the crime.
As China seeks ways to hold children accountable for heinous murders — the most notorious of which are committed against other children — it’s often the victims’ parents who are left waiting for justice that may never come.
Gong Junli, whose eight-year-old daughter was stabbed to death by a 13-year-old boy, is one of many grieving parents waiting anxiously to see whether the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) will impose a prison sentence on her child’s killer.
The single father’s plight made headlines in March when prosecutors agreed to file criminal charges against the boy, who allegedly persuaded the girl to take him to a forest in Shinkyunghyang in September 2022, according to Red Star News.
Authorities say the boy then stabbed her multiple times and abandoned her body in an aspen grove.
Investigators said the 13-year-old boy prepared knives, blades, disposable gloves, plastic rope and other murder tools and left them in the woods where he had invited his victim to play.
Authorities said the boy showed no remorse for the crime and spoke calmly to police during questioning.
Junri’s security camera captured the moment the girl was lured away by the boy, who had previously invited her to go with him into the forest on two previous occasions.
His grieving father told Red Star that his mother had beaten and scolded him, which had developed a hatred for women, so he plotted to kill her and a high-achieving female classmate, choosing the eight-year-old as his first victim.
Junli told the outlet that she fainted when she first learned of her daughter’s fate after the family who was babysitting her told her not to look at her body.
“If you see this for the rest of your life, you’ll never recover,” they warned him.
Junri, who cuts wood every day to divert attention from the scene of his daughter’s crime, initially believed the suspect would definitely pay for his crime but now accepts he may never get the justice he seeks.
China lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 14 to 12 in 2021. But unlike in the United States, children are not sent to detention centers and murder cases rarely receive adult-level penalties.
Junli’s case is similar to one that occurred last year when a four-year-old girl died in Hubei province after being pushed into a fertilizer tank by a boy under the age of 12 just 300 yards from her home.
The case against the boy was dropped in January due to his age, according to the Southern Metropolis Daily.
The father, who is still seeking a continuation of the trial, claims the boy killed his child “simply because my daughter and his sister had a repeated argument over a toy.”
The boy has reportedly been placed in a psychological correctional facility, the same punishment as other juvenile offenders under the age of 12.
Even before the 2021 changes, such light sentences were common practice: In 2019, a 13-year-old boy was sentenced to just three years in a juvenile rehabilitation facility for raping and stabbing to death a 10-year-old girl.
The victim’s father said the boy, who was under the age of criminal responsibility, lured the girl to his home, sexually assaulted her, then stabbed her to death and then dumped her body in a forest in Dalian city, according to Jin Yun News.
The case caused a huge uproar in China at the time, with public opinion already reaching a boiling point after police were forced to release a 12-year-old boy who confessed to stabbing his mother to death.
The boy began attending school a few days later, Chinese media said.
This outrage ultimately led to reforms in 2021 that lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 12, but despite the new law, cases against minors continue to rise in China.
According to CCTV, prosecutors are set to indict 243,000 minors between 2020 and 2023, with caseloads growing by an average of 5% per year.
The Supreme People’s Court recently announced that it had handed down sentences on 12,000 minors in the first three months of 2024.
The court also acknowledged that four minors aged between 12 and 14 were sentenced in April to between 10 and 15 years in prison, but did not disclose what their crimes were.
Along with the ruling, the court issued new guidelines on juvenile crime prevention and suggested that courts could hold parents or guardians responsible for their children’s actions.
The court specifically noted that 30% of those who committed violent crimes between 2021 and 2013 were “left behind” or came from single-parent families.
Left-behind children are those who remain in rural areas while their parents migrate to cities for work.
In China, children left at home, including Junli’s daughter, make up the majority of victims of bullying.
A 2019 survey by a Beijing-based NGO found that of 14,000 left-behind children, 90% said they had suffered psychological abuse, 65% experienced physical violence, and 30% had been sexually abused.
The spate of violent incidents has led many to urge parents to return home, focus on raising their children and stay out of trouble, with the Supreme People’s Court calling for communities to come together to tackle the issue.
“It is essential and urgent that schools, families, social organisations and government agencies work together to create a joint working system to address bullying and resolve the problem at an early stage,” the court said.
