China's One-Child Policy's Ripple Effect on Singapore and Beyond?

Outrageous. On Sunday, 18 March 2012, a PRC couple attempted to kidnap a Singaporean boy in the suburbs of Ang Mo Kio. Read reports here(CNA), here(ST), or here(inSing).

It is shocking that such an attempt was carried out in a public mall, during a Sunday afternoon with an ongoing event and high human traffic. The PRC couple was so brazen to strike during the few seconds a child was unsupervised, and if it were not for the mother's immediate confrontation with the PRC woman leading her son away, who knows what would have happened to the boy.

In China, the strict One-Child Policy restricts parents to only one child, and when compounded with the traditional Chinese preference of a male heir, adoptions of baby boys are commonplace and highly sought after. In this article (China frees 24,000 abducted women, kids in 2011), the report stated that the PRC Ministry of Public Security said that Chinese police have rescued 8,660 children and 15,458 women in 2011.

These children and women are all victims of human trafficking, and more than 2,000 children were discovered to have been abducted and sold for adoption. Additionally, adoption in China is seemingly less-regulated (there is a China Center of Adoption Affairs overseen by the Ministry of Civil Affairs) where couples can adopt children from any source.

Tellingly, the article also paints a grim picture of the fates of children and women abducted by human traffickers. Abducted women are forced into prostitution, even all the way to freaking Angola (which is in Africa by the way), and in 2007, Chinese authorities discovered and freed thousands of people forced into slave labour in brickyards and mines.

Read more about Slave Labour in China here(Time World/Slave Labor in China Sparks Outrage) and here(New York Times/Child slave labor revelations sweeping China).

In short, victims of human trafficking in China end up either as adopted children, slaves, or prostitutes (for the women only, I hope). And so far, all reported cases of abduction were domestic and confined within Chinese borders and territories. And if the PRC couple are part of a global syndicate, expanding abduction operations outside of China, I shudder to consider the consequences. Will more children be led away by women misleading them into believing that she will bring them back home, or worse, forcibly kidnapped or bought from impoverished and rural families in our neighbouring nations?