By: Eric Metaxas
BreakPoint
It’s funny how our worldview affects the way we live—and shapes our cultural destiny. Here are some real world examples.
Most parents, when they travel with young children, take along a few things to make the journey easier: juice packs, Gameboy, and a few cookies. But when one Chinese father travels with his little girl, he takes along handcuffs.
The father, whose name is Chen Yen, took his six-year-old daughter to visit her grandparents during China’s recent Spring Festival. At a train station, a photographer noticed that he had handcuffed himself to his child, and the photographer snapped a picture. And it quickly went viral.
As Mr. Chen told The Daily Mail, “I saw a warning by police … to take care as traffickers and pickpockets would be out stealing in the holiday rush. I don’t care about pickpockets,” he added, “but I do care very much about losing my daughter.”
Mr. Chen has good reason to worry. An astonishing 70,000 children are kidnapped by gangs every year in China—70,000.
The kidnappings are fueled by China’s One Child Policy, which restricts couples to just one baby. Given China’s cultural preference for boys, many couples abort female babies, leading to a huge disparity between the sexes. China now has some thirty-three million more men than women, and many of these men are desperate for wives—desperate enough to pay a gang to kidnap a “bride” for them.
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