The new sexual revolution

NGOs and training centers are challenging age-old misconceptions about disabled people and sexuality in a bid to assert their human rights, as Yang Wanli reports.

On a winter afternoon in Beijing, two late-teenage women were climbing the sunlit stairs of an old six-story apartment block in the Xicheng district, when their progress was brought to an abrupt halt by the sight of a young man standing in the shadows, completely absorbed in the act of masturbation.

The girls shrieked and fled the scene, then they called the police to report "the pervert". However, the story ended not with a prosecution, but with the arrival of two tearful and despondent parents who had been called to collect their mentally disabled, 18-year-old son.