Society

5 kids drowned by accident: official

By Li Xinzhu (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-02-26 07:29

Frequent accidents involving rural children raise eyebrows

SHANGHAI: Five children who were found dead in a pond in Tiantai county of Zhejiang province on Feb 22, four days after they were reported missing, drowned by accident, the county government confirmed yesterday.

Four of the deceased - Cai Kangni, 13, Cai Yani, 12, Cai Danni, 10 and Cai Binbin, 9 - were siblings. The fifth, Cai Songtao, 7, was their cousin.

The three girls and two boys had gone out to play the afternoon of Feb 18, the fifth day of the Chinese New Year, and never returned.

After they were reported missing, local police launched a massive search for the children and the media broadcast photographs of the children on television, in newspapers and on the Internet, with hundreds of netizens leaving messages of consolation.

On Feb 22, a worker who was draining water from the fishfarm pond, situated a stone's throw from the children's home, discovered the bodies.

With the government confirming the children's death due to drowning as an accident, questions over the safety of rural children in the country are once again at the forefront.

On Sept 27 last year, seven kids accidentally drowned in an abandoned ceramic factory in Mairen village of Zhumadian, Henan province, Xinhua reported.

There are about 300 million children in China and more than 60,000 are killed every year in accidents, averaging an astonishing 150 deaths per day, according to figures released during the second National Symposium on the Prevention of Child Injury in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, last year.

According to surveys by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) between 2002 and 2005, death by drowning was most common among rural children.

The CDC said, citing a survey, "44 percent of injury deaths among children aged between one and 14 are caused by drowning".

Children in China's countryside frequently fall prey to other tragedies as well.

Three girls aged five, six and eight were sexually attacked by a village head in Pingguo county, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, while their parents were away at work in Guangdong province, Xinhua recently reported.

Four children died in a fire in Bingyang county of Guangxi on Feb 23.

Due to the large number of migrant workers who move out of their hometowns in search of jobs, children are mostly left behind with grandparents, who lack the ability to fully take care of them, said experts.

"This explains why so many rural kids are involved in accidents," said He Yi, director of the children's department with the women's federation of Anhui province.

There are more than 150 million migrant workers in China with 58 million children, including 40 million under the age of 14, who are left behind with senior members of the families, according to separate studies by the All-China Women's Federation and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

"We need to pay more attention to those kids in order to prevent them from falling victim to avoidable accidents," said He, adding Anhui is one of the major provinces supplying migrant workers to the country.

"The safety issue aside, we should also put the rural children's education and emotional development high on our list," He added.

(China Daily 02/26/2010 page6)