Profiles

Father pretends as a john to rescue prostitute daughter

By Coldness Kwan (Chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2006-08-18 17:05

A step-father in North China's Shaanxi Province pretended to be a john and "asked for" prostitutes in a number of places around neighboring Shanxi Province in the hopes of saving his step-daughter who he believed was abducted and sold into prostitution, according to a report on huash.com.

The girl, 14, quit school and worked for a weaving factory with a monthly salary of 150 Yuan.

The man said his stepdaughter never came back after going out one day this May and he and his wife tried in vain to find her. The woman's ex-husband told them the girl may have been abducted and taken to neighboring Shanxi Province.

Local police refused to help because of the lack of evidence so the man decided to take his nephew with him to Shanxi to save his stepdaughter himself.

The two suspected the girl was sold to prostitution ring in a Shanxi town called Xiadian.

The man walked into several brothels and asked the owners to bring all the prostitutes they had to the front for him to choose.

"I laid down my dignity for the sake of my daughter," the man said.

"But one of the brothels wouldn't let me go unless I took a prostitute," the man said. He then chose a girl of the same age as his daughter with a Shaanxi accent. In a private room, the man showed a photo of his daughter to the girl, who said she seemed familiar but didn't know where she was.

The man and his nephew visited scores of brothels with no luck. With little money left, they decided to return home before they received a call from a stranger who said the girl had been transported to another place called Xiyin and worked in a bathhouse.

At the beginning of this August, the man walked into the bathhouse that the stranger told him about, where he found his stepdaughter, who had dared not try to escape for fear of being beaten by the brothel owner.

After her rescue the girl was reluctant to talk about her experiences other than to say there were many other girls like her in such places.