The Paper's reporters Chen Leizhu and Wang Xuanhui
A serious illness caused the father and son to be "imprisoned" in different ways.
From the age of 11, Liu Li's living space was compressed into a small house of about 15 square meters.
The 14-year-old boy suffers from myasthenia gravis and has been out of school for years.
After his father was caught involved in smuggling, his mother ran away, and the family was completely broken.
The social worker went to Liu Li's home to visit him and his grandmother. In addition to the special signature, the pictures in this article are taken by the surging news reporter Chen Leizhu
Today, Liu Li's life is only 70-year-old grandmother and he is dependent on him, and the two rely on minimum insurance and relief funds to survive. Although he had a hard time, in his grandmother's view, in a way, Liu Li was luckier than other children of the same kind, "at least he couldn't hear the gossip outside."
Chen Fang, 45, once felt the discrimination and pressure brought about by "gossip". Since her husband went to jail for manslaughter in 2009, she survived 12 years alone with a pair of children. She said that over the years, she worked four jobs at most, was often talked about and ostracized, and even her daughter, who was in elementary school, could not escape the ridicule of her classmates. ”
Like Grandma Liu Li, Chen Fang also "consciously" separated her children from the general population, calling them "such children", and the Ministry of Justice made statistics on them in a 2006 survey that 460,000 detainees had minor children, and the number had exceeded 600,000.
In the following 15 years, although this data was not published again, the statistical work in various places did not slacken off. According to a survey and research report by the Fujian Education Assistance Association, as of October 2018, the total number of minor children of prisoners in Fujian Province has reached 17,922. According to the above-mentioned report, among the minor children of prisoners, the dropout rate is 26.9%, the incidence of psychological problems is 29.5%, the incidence of internet addiction, smoking addiction and other bad behaviors is 22.4%, and the incidence of law-breaking behavior is 21.2%, and some have become "de facto orphans".
The old mansion where Liu Li's family lived before has collapsed.
Disappearing father
In the high temperature of more than 30 degrees Celsius in Fuzhou City, the two electric fans in front of Liu Li's bed have long been stopped because of the power outage, and there is a white medical urine pot on the floor next to the bed, and a long catheter is connected to the mouth of the pot, and the air is flooded with moisture, mixed with a faint odor.
On the morning of May 12, 14-year-old Liu Lihan lay in bed and casually flipped through a copy of the "Sketch Basic Tutorial", saying that his mother bought it for him, but he could not remember how long he had not seen his mother.
As early as half a year ago, Liu Li's family was only left with him and his grandmother Fu Ying. On February 11, 2021, the grandson and grandson spent a deserted Chinese New Year's Eve night in an old house "lent" to them by relatives. Liu Li felt strange, he didn't know where his parents went, he wanted to ask his grandmother, but in the end he didn't open his mouth.
About two months before the Spring Festival, Liu Li's father was caught by the police for smuggling oil, and shortly thereafter, his mother also died.
Fu Ying, who is 70 years old this year, recalled that her family was still "like a family" before Liu Li was 6 years old, and although she lived a poor life, she was still getting by. The change occurred in 2011, the year Liu Li was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, and his family took him around to seek medical treatment, from Fuzhou to Shanghai to Beijing, they spent all their savings, borrowed from relatives and friends, but failed to curb the deterioration of the condition. Six years later, Liu Li was 11 years old, unable to walk, and eventually dropped out of school at home, never leaving his small room of about 15 square meters.
Fu Ying recalled that after Liu Li dropped out of school, his parents gradually accepted the reality and no longer had illusions about their children's condition, although the family's expenses were not as large as when they sought medical treatment before, but the foreign debt owed was also an astronomical amount for them. A few years ago, the family's house collapsed, and the family could not come up with the money to repair the house, and finally moved into an old house of relatives, and only then did they barely have a place to stay. In the following years, Liu Li's parents were running for their livelihood, and his father worked outside the home for many years in order to pay off his debts, usually only returning home once a few months, and the family did not know what he was doing.
In November 2020, Fu Ying suddenly received news that Liu Li's father had been arrested by the public security organs on suspicion of smuggling. Shortly thereafter, Liu Li's mother left home alone, and has not been heard from at all. Fu Ying said that since his son was arrested, Liu Li has never asked about his father's condition, and during the time of the accident, some people in the family have come one after another to mention this matter, "I want to hide from him, afraid of causing harm to the child, but I think he probably guessed it, he didn't ask, I didn't dare to say." ”
Today, Liu Li has been dependent on his grandmother for more than half a year, relying on the minimum guarantee of five or six hundred yuan per month, and the staff of the community and the social union of the public welfare organization come to the door to comfort. Fu Ying said that the financial difficulties are nothing to them, the most difficult thing is that as she gets older, she has no way to take care of her paralyzed grandson alone, "I don't know where his mother is, I don't know how many years his father will be sentenced, if I leave, what will the child do?" Although both parents are still alive, he is actually an orphan. ”
A letter from Rain's father home in prison.
Dusty family letters
A sudden serious illness, an inaccessible crime, and an escape without warning, Liu Li's originally perfect family was completely broken, and the trajectory of his life changed.
The 9-year-old Lin Hao has a similar experience with Liu Li, who was found to have biliary atresia only half a month after he was born, and was even "sentenced to death" saying that if he did not receive effective treatment, he might not live to be more than one year old.
The words "effective treatment" hollowed out all the savings of Lin Hao's parents in just one year, and he survived, but the follow-up treatment is still a bottomless pit. Lin Hao's mother, Wu Hui, recalled that after Lin Hao was born, the family's economic pressure increased sharply. In August 2013, Lin Hao's father was caught by the police for drug trafficking and later sentenced to life imprisonment by the court.
Wu Hui mentioned the experience of taking her child alone to seek medical treatment in the past 8 years, but she still couldn't help but cry, not knowing how she survived. Lin Hao's condition has been stabilized after an operation, but biliary atresia requires lifelong medicine, and eventually a liver transplant, "I don't know when the child's father will come out, nor do I know when we can carry it, I can't even take into account whether the child will have personality defects in the absence of father's love, family affection is too luxurious for our kind of family." ”
In the view of 56-year-old Xu Yinglan, the saying of "family affection luxury" is helpless but an indisputable fact. After her youngest son was sentenced to ten years in prison for credit card fraud, she single-handedly pulled her grandson Xiaoyu up. In the past 4 years, although her son has repeatedly proposed that Xu Yinglan can take Xiaoyu to prison for visits, she has refused, "I don't want my child to know that his father is in prison, even the letters he wrote I will carefully hide, do not dare to let children see." ”
Xu Yinglan recalled that in 2012, Xiaoyu's mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor shortly after she became pregnant, "Shortly after Xiaoyu was born, my husband had another car accident. A series of mutations made Xiaoyu's father feel stressed, and since 2014, he has quit his job at the supermarket to work and has rarely returned home. It was not until the end of 2016, when the family received the detention notice from the public security organs, that they learned that Xiaoyu's father had broken the law.
After Xiaoyu's father was arrested, his mother's condition became more and more serious, and soon she could not even walk the road, and the family had no choice but to send her back to her mother's house and be taken care of by her mother's family. Today, Xiaoyu is 9 years old, and in his memory, he no longer remembers his father's appearance. Xu Yinglan said that in the past 4 years, Xiaoyu's father would send letters back every once in a while, and almost every letter would mention Xiaoyu, and repeatedly asked his parents to bring Xiaoyu to visit, but Xiaoyu did not know about it, "I know he wants children, but I dare not take Xiaoyu with me."
At Xu Yinglan's home, the letters sent back by Xiaoyu's father were tightly wrapped and hidden in the highest part of the cabinet, and she said that Xiaoyu was now literate and she could not let him see the letters. In recent years, Xu Yinglan has always stared at the crack in the door from time to time, and she said that the people at the post office sometimes stuff letters through the cracks in the doors, which makes her very worried. In Xu Yinglan's heart, his son's letter wrote Xiaoyu's missing father's love, and also hid the "demons" that could take away Xiaoyu's childhood.
Trees and roots
The Surging News found in a recent visit that for most of the children of prisoners, the lack of family affection is the norm, compared with a small number of children who have faced the dilemma of no one to raise.
In the past 4 years, Wei Gang has never taken the initiative to mention his parents. In 2017, Wei Gang's father died of a sudden illness, and at the moment he fell under the tree, Wei Gang completely became an orphan.
One of Wei Gang's distant relatives, Cao Lilan, said Wei Gang's grandmother had died just two months before his father died of illness, when wei Gang's family was no longer there, and his mother had been jailed a few years earlier for killing her own daughter. It was Cao Lilan who resisted the opposition from everyone in the family and adopted Wei Gang, "At that time, he was 5 years old, but he couldn't speak, couldn't do personal hygiene, and couldn't even eat by himself." ”
In Cao Lilan's impression, Wei Gang's family had been in a sick state since he remarried from his mother He Huan. She said that He Huan gave birth to a daughter with her ex-husband before marrying into the Wei family, and the two had discussed smuggling them to live abroad together, so He Huan borrowed a sum of money from relatives and friends and sent her ex-husband out first, but did not want the other party to leave and then there was no news. He Huan, who was tragically abandoned, has since suffered from mental illness and was already abnormal before remarrying.
The change occurred in the year Wei Gang was born, shortly after Wei Gang was born in 2012. One day, when He Huan was taking his daughter out, he pushed her daughter down the ditch and drowned. After the incident, after the judicial organs evaluated, the court found that He Huan was not in a state of illness at the time of the crime, and she was sentenced to prison for this.
Wei Gang's home had become a mess since the moment He Huan was arrested. According to local villagers, most of Wei Gang's close relatives have intellectual disabilities, Wei Gang has been in a state of no one to take care of since he was born, and his father and grandmother will not take care of the children, so that Wei Gang will not be able to do anything until he is 5 years old.
Cao Lilan is still not sure how Wei Gang's father died, she guessed that it may have died of a sudden disease such as cerebral hemorrhage or heart disease, and most of the people in the village have only a vague impression of Wei Gang's father's death - in the summer of 2017, he suddenly fell down when he took Wei Gang to the tree at the entrance of the village, and later when some villagers came to check, they found that he was dead. At that time, Wei Gang just stood next to his father in a daze, without panic or sadness.
Cao Lilan remembered that Wei Gang's father's funeral was very simple, and when she went to mourn as a distant relative, she noticed the young Wei Gang and looked at him silly and stunned, and Cao Lilan felt a pang of pain in her heart. After some inquiry, she knew that in the past 5 years, Wei Gang had been in a "free range" state, and no one in his close relatives was willing to raise him. That night, Cao Lilan took Wei Gang back to his home, "I can't watch this child wander outside like this, nor can I let the Wei family have a broken root here." ”
"Can't break the root" became the most common sentence Cao Lilan said when facing his family's opposition. After four years of careful care, Wei Gang now looks no different from ordinary children, but Cao Lilan knows that Wei Gang is still a little different from other children after all, and the silence he shows when he is mentioned as a parent makes Cao Lilan feel worried. She said that whenever this time the child would think of the big tree at the mouth of the village, "the child may already have a shadow in his heart, I used to think that he did not know life and death at that time, and now it seems that he knows everything in his heart." ”
A minor child of a prisoner wrote a message to his father at an event. Courtesy of respondents
Missing and compensating
Cao Lilan began to pay attention to Wei Gang's psychological problems, which began a few years ago when he took Wei Gang to visit his mother He Huan in prison. She said she hesitated before deciding to tell him about her mother's imprisonment, but ultimately decided to tell the truth. Cao Lilan remembered that when Wei Gang first met his mother, both mother and son were very silent, almost didn't say anything, and the situation in the next few meetings didn't improve much, "I think it is probably difficult for them to make up for their missing family affection." ”
Wu Yongcai is also facing the problem of family repair, this 45-year-old middle-aged man was sentenced to prison for manslaughter 12 years ago, when his daughter was not yet a month old, he hurried home after the incident, and even before he had time to look at his daughter, he went to the public security bureau to turn himself in, leaving his wife Chen Fang with two underage children and a mess on the ground.
According to Chen Fang's recollection, when her daughter was just born in 2009, her husband and father-in-law worked at the same construction site, because the father-in-law and the co-workers had a verbal altercation, and her husband Wu Yongcai later looked for the other party to comment, but unexpectedly the conflict lost his hand and beat the other party to death. Chen Fang said that she was still in confinement at the time of the incident, and before Wu Yongcai went out, she had advised him not to go, but she could not stop him, "I only learned that there was an accident when I received a call from a co-worker at night, and he had already beaten people to death when he came back halfway, but he didn't tell me anything." ”
Wu Yongcai and his father were later sentenced to 15 and 7 years in prison, respectively, and Chen Fang had to go out to work to earn a living after confinement. She said that her husband and father-in-law were both arrested, her mother died early, and no one in her family could help her. During that time, in order to support her two children, she had to go to the embroidery factory to find a job, bring the embroidery home to rush to work, and at most, work 4 jobs at the same time.
Due to the intensity of the work, Chen Fang's body gradually had problems, affected by cervical spondylosis, and she was unable to work in just a few years. In order to maintain her life, Chen Fang went to sweep the road and also picked up waste. She said that in the years when her husband was imprisoned, the financial difficulties and physical pressures could be endured for her, and the most difficult thing was to be discriminated against and ostracized by people around her, and even verbally insulted her in public.
Chen Fang said that in the past ten years, no matter what kind of difficulties she encountered, she gritted her teeth and persevered, but only when she faced her daughter, she felt a deep sense of guilt. Every time the school held a parent-teacher conference, it was her brother who accompanied her, especially when Chen Fang learned that a classmate had teased her daughter with her father's imprisonment, she almost broke down, "To be honest, I hated him (husband) at that time." ”
Later, Chen Fang heard from her fellow villagers that some children in the same township were isolated by their classmates because their parents were in prison, and they did not dare to talk to people, so she began to talk to her daughter often, teach her the principles of being a person, and even persuaded herself to take her daughter to visit in prison, hoping to break the image of her father as a "bad person" in her daughter's mind. ”
In November 2020, Wu Yongcai was released from prison after four commutations. He said that he missed his children every day during his sentence, and he worked hard to reform and strive for a reduction in prison, that is, he wanted to go home early and make up for his lack of fatherly love for his children, but when this day really came, he suddenly found that he had been missing in his daughter's life for too long, and it was difficult to make up for it.
Invisible prison
Wu Yongcai is still obsessed with the parent-child activities of his daughter's school. He said that when he was serving his sentence in prison, his wife had mentioned the matter more than once, and he had secretly resolved that he would accompany his daughter to a parent-child activity as a father after he was released from prison.
It has been more than half a year since he was released from prison, and no one has mentioned the parent-child activities that the family once looked forward to. Wu Yongcai said that in the years of serving the sentence, his wife and children have had a very hard time, he wants to make up for it but can't find a way, and now he can only express his apologies to them by working hard to make money, but this has a very limited effect on the children's emotional and psychological trauma repair.
Huang Li, a Chinese marriage and family counselor and vice president of the Fujian Provincial Poverty Relief Public Welfare Association, said that she began to pay attention to the minor children of prisoners in 2014, and found in many years of work that in addition to material and economic difficulties, most of these children have been discriminated against and isolated outside, and some children play the role of "punching bag" at home at the same time, they are easily treated as aliens and burdens, usually emotionally depressed, dare not express their thoughts and emotions.
Huang Li said that after more than half of the prisoners were imprisoned, the other half left their original families, and the children became "de facto orphans" after that, resulting in psychological problems such as grievances, closure, inferiority, anger, antagonism, alienation, and escape, just like being locked up in an invisible prison, it is difficult to get rid of themselves.
It is worth noting that this special group known as "de facto orphans" is quite numerous, and the Ministry of Justice published a relevant investigation in 2006 saying that there were 460,000 detainees in China at that time with minor children, a total of more than 600,000 people. Since then, many individuals and organizations have conducted investigations and studies on this group, and concluded that the dropout rate, the incidence of psychological problems and the incidence of bad behavior of minor children of prisoners are higher than those of ordinary minors, and the minor children of some prisoners have shown problems such as learning difficulties, dropouts, and interpersonal barriers due to discrimination.
According to a "Fujian Provincial Investigation Report on the Basic Situation of Detained Prisoners and Their Children of Minors" made by the Fujian Provincial Education Assistance Association in 2018, the association once conducted a survey of detainees with minor children in 18 prisons in Fujian Province, and the statistical results show that about 80% of the inmates with minor children are in their youth, the dropout rate of their minor children is 26.9%, the incidence of psychological problems is 29.5%, and the incidence of bad behaviors such as Internet addiction and tobacco addiction is 22.4%. The incidence of legal violations was 21.2 per cent, of which 59.3 per cent of households were generally poorly economically poor.
According to the above-mentioned report, 66.1% of the minor children of prisoners in Fujian Province are in the primary school stage and 31.5% are in the secondary school stage, and the dropout rate is much higher than the 15.5% data released by the National Bureau of Statistics at that time. At the same time, their incidence of psychological problems, bad behavior and violations of the law is much higher than that of adolescents of the same age, which may have an important relationship with the prison sentences of their parents.
According to a staff member of the association, although the total number of minor children of prisoners at the national level has not been updated since 2006, the statistics work in various places has been advancing, and as of October 2018, when the association made the above survey report, the total number of minor children of prisoners in Fujian Province alone reached 17,922.
In view of this special group, the Fujian Provincial Education Assistance Association once suggested in the above-mentioned report that we should improve China's juvenile protection system, establish a linkage mechanism for the minor children of prisoners led by the civil affairs department, give play to the role of state assistance, and at the same time actively summarize the experience of non-governmental organizations and social groups that assist the minor children of prisoners throughout the country, support specialized social organizations, and promote the improvement of the rescue mechanism for this group.
(Note: In order to protect the privacy of minors, the characters in the text are pseudonyms except Huang Li)
Source: The Paper