"Brother, buy a bouquet of flowers for your sister!" Demystify the evil industrial chain behind the street flower girls

Reports from Rui Company (id: shangjiezz).

Author / Zhou Huixian

The neon lights illuminate the city late at night, but behind the light, the darkness still soaks the hidden corners.

A little girl bit her lips tightly, her cheeks were still printed with red palm prints, and before she could cry, she quickly trotted to a young couple and dragged the man's legs to death: "Brother, buy a bouquet of flowers for your sister." ”

In the dark of night, there is always a group of such "stalking" flower girls, who walk in groups on the most prosperous streets of the city's nightlife, ghostly appear in front of passers-by, and forcefully beg them to buy roses that are several times higher than the market price.

They sell compassion and become a "dog skin plaster" that cannot be torn off on the road. What passers-by don't know, however, is that the girls may have been slapped viciously a few seconds ago, just because they didn't sell the roses in their hands.

The delicate and beautiful bouquet, reflected in the night light and the moonlight, becomes more and more intense, like the scarlet left in the corner of the mouth of the vampire who has just completed the drinking action in the movie.

Unexpectedly, under the strong, precocious expressions of the female brides, they seemed to be accustomed to all this. They don't ask for any help, they just sell flowers as always, and passers-by are used to it, or buy or refuse, and the night is so moving and flowing...

Is it normal for innocence, which should have been carefully cared for by parents, to be torn apart by ugly transactions? What kind of truth is hidden behind this?

01

A flower girl who was "kidnapped" by her parents

"It was dawn, the sun was rising, people came to the street in new clothes and saw little girls smiling and freezing to death in the corners."

This is the end of "The Little Girl Who Sold Matches" in Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, and in the faint light of matches, the little girl sees her grandmother who loves her and smiles and runs to death.

These flower girls who brave the scorching sun and the cold wind are not the "little girls selling matches" in this era. Some enthusiastic citizens have also suspected that these children were abducted by human traffickers, but the reality is often more cruel, and some police officers have found that many girls' parents are actually one of the "black hands behind the scenes".

In several counties bordering Shangqiu and Zhoukou in Henan Province, there are many acrobatic schools, and before entering school, parents have agreed with the school that as long as the children sell art after completing their studies, they can not charge tuition. Many students begin to enter the school to learn acrobatics at the age of 3 or 4, and after 1 year of graduation, they begin to tour the country and sell art to make money.

Most of the students enrolled in the school are from poor families, so many families will send their children to acrobatic schools as a way to reduce the burden, and naturally will not care about their academic performance, let alone how the school "distributes" the future of their children. In the eyes of parents, the ultimate destination of children is undoubtedly to return to their homeland, facing the land handed down from generation to generation, and since the results are the same, there is no need to dwell on the previous life course.

From the moment they entered these acrobatic schools, the trajectory of these children's lives has deviated from the normal track. These children who have not grown up with their parents since childhood are inevitably targeted by people with ghost fetuses.

There are special local intermediaries responsible for contacting acrobatic schools, selecting suitable children from among the students, and the selected children will be taken to major cities to sell art and flowers. However, parents are not unaware of these, they are not exclusive to the arrangement of schools, as long as the children are "rented" to the big city, then the whole family can also share the remuneration.

The acrobatic schools in poor areas of Henan Province are only the simplest link in the upstream chain of selling flowers and black products. Schools aren't the only source of these flower girls, but they are also active in the barren lands across China — villagers who specialize in organizing their children to go out and sell flowers for a living, a more seductive profession than part-time work.

02

Wildfires burn endlessly

A few years ago, after seeing the "charm" of this profession, Ah Qiang (pseudonym) spent 28,000 yuan to buy an old truck and asked someone to convert it into a "caravan" that can accommodate many people. With this broken car, Ah Qiang dragged the "rented" children, shouldered the expectations of the children's parents, and rushed to the road of wealth in his dreams.

In order to ensure that the income is maximized, Cuong will conduct "skills training" before the children officially "take up their posts", teaching flower selling skills and speech skills. Of course, doing this business does not require noble professional ethics and excellent professionalism, so that children can be as stubborn as possible, and the flower selling business has been half successful.

In the morning, when the children go to bed, the wife will go to the flower shop to buy cheap flowers. After everyone finished lunch, they had to "go to work" under the supervision of Ah Qiang in the afternoon.

Cuong is the responsible "boss", the children sell flowers, he is not far away to monitor the daily operation of the "company" to facilitate employee assessment. He also summed up a very practical reward and punishment system - the highest-selling child will get a grain of sugar or a small package of cookies, but if a child is at the bottom of the sales, or if the "income" is found, he will be reprimanded, scolded, or even not given food.

In this way, the new force of "selling flowers" under Ah Qiang has become the head snake of the bustling streets of a city in the south.

Ah Qiang is just one of the army of flower sellers, and in China, there are thousands of Ah Qiang.

More than a decade ago, the black production of flowers and flowers was like bacteria, breeding in dark corners across the country. The local police are not without attention to this group of "cunning" girls who are beyond their age. They are like weeds that can't burn endlessly.

Some police have revealed that the driving force behind the organization of girls to sell flowers is generally neighbors of the same village or neighboring villages. These neighbors are generally related to each other, and even if they are caught by the police, they are rarely severely punished because of the kinship between the two parties and the absence of illegal acts such as abduction and trafficking.

These flower sellers who were rescued by the police and returned home will be repeated by another group, or even the same organizers.

Just like this, the "huge profit" of organizing girls to sell flowers is like an inexhaustible weed, and whenever the spring breeze blows, it will get a new life. Every year, this low-cost profiteering "industry" is like the song of the Siren, tempting hundreds of villagers to tear up the future of their relatives' daughters with their own hands.

It is sad that some parents, after seeing the huge profits of organizing girls to sell flowers, will even extend their claws to their daughters and drag their families to sell flowers. It turns out that not all children grow up under the protection of their parents, listening to fairy tales, and "less carelessly". Poverty is like a magnifying glass, infinitely magnifiing the ugliness of human nature.

The flower selling industry chain has also torn open a big road for criminals. Under the inducement of interests, it is very likely that traffickers who abduct young children to "sell flowers" are very likely; even if girls follow relatives to sell flowers, the personal safety of girls is difficult to be guaranteed, and there have been cases of children selling flowers being beaten to death by passers-by due to "profiteering" peddling, in addition, the virginity of these girls is also difficult to be guarded.

03

Left-behind children targeted

In the movie "What a Home", the parents of the protagonist boy intend to marry their 11-year-old daughter to a trader, just in exchange for a gift worth a few months for the family. What parents don't know is that children should not be tools to earn their own money.

In China, the industrial chain of "renting" left-behind children is becoming increasingly large, and there are criminals who "buy" the children's right to use from their parents, and organize children who should have studied hard in school to sell flowers, sell art, and even beg and steal.

Previously, the "Bao Yuming sexual assault and adoption case" that attracted widespread attention from the society was pulled out of the black production chain behind the adoption, an innocent child was abducted and sold to the online foster care platform, and the platform manager pretended to be the child's parents, under the pretext of "giving the child a better tomorrow", the child was sold to pedophiles.

Not only do parents in remote mountainous areas use their children as a tool to make money, but parents who grow up in cities are no exception.

There are parents who rent their daughters to "medical care". With children, it is convenient for the "medical care" to disguise themselves as patients who take their children to see a doctor, so that they can talk to other patients. There are also parents who rent their children to wedding ceremony companies to act as flower children.

There are even 3-year-old children who make money by "eating and broadcasting" and are fed to 70 pounds by their parents; 5-year-old Taobao models are punched and kicked by their parents because they are "not working well"; and 8-year-old children who model excessive makeup appear in the public eye...

As one mother said: "Children are small, it is easier to attract traffic, and it is quick to use children to be sympathetic and quick to make money." But what the mother overlooks is that such quick money is made at the expense of the child's future, and such a deal is really not cost-effective."

The data shows that the crime rate of left-behind children accounts for 70% of juvenile crimes and is on the rise. The rental industry chain poisons not only children's physical and mental health, but also the expectations of our nation.