Help sought for left-behind children

Governments should take more responsibility in looking after children to avoid tragedies when their parents have to be away from home, experts said on Friday.

They were commenting after police said that two men suspected of murdering two siblings at their home in Zhongxin village in Bijie, Guizhou province, were captured on Thursday.

The suspects had confessed to killing the 15-year-old girl and her 12-year-old brother while the children's father and elder sister were not at home on Tuesday, police said.

The dead girl was a school dropout who had suffered from encephalitis and the boy was a primary school student, police said, adding that their mother had died.

Police found that the father, surnamed Zhang, left home for the provincial capital of Guiyang on Sunday and that the family's eldest daughter, who is 17, went to see a relative on Monday night. Neither one was at home when the attack occurred on the younger children, who had been left in the care of an uncle.

Beijing Youth Daily said the two suspects are from the same village as the victims. One is 20 and the other 17, the paper said.

Yao Jianlong, a law professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law specializing in juvenile protection, said it is not the first time that such a tragedy has occurred in Bijie, a mountainous area where many people seek work in other provinces.

"But the local government has not paid enough attention to the problem," Yao said.

On June 9, four children from another family, ages 5 to 13, died after drinking pesticide at their home in Bijie, triggering public attention.

In 2012, five street children from Bijie died from carbon monoxide poisoning after burning charcoal from a roadside dumpster to keep warm.

"The victims in these cases are not only the children of their families, but also of the nation," Yao said. "The local government has an obligation to take care of them and ensure they are safe at home."

He said the father in Tuesday's case has an obligation "because under Chinese law he must make sure his children are protected or ensure that the uncle was able to look after the children when he (the father) was not at home".

However, in modern China it is hard to escape the fact that many parents leave their hometowns to seek work elsewhere due to a lack of jobs at home, leaving their children behind, Yao added.

Sun Yunxiao, a researcher at the China Youth and Children Research Center, said such children should be taught how to protect themselves.

Sun suggested that migrant parents provide more love for their children instead of only giving them more money.

More than 60 million children had been left with relatives - often grandparents - in rural areas, according to a 2013 report by the All-China Women's Federation, with nearly 3.4 percent of them living alone.

caoyin@chinadaily.com.cn