Progress made in war on child sex abuse

Social groups and rights advocates step up efforts to combat attacks

Imagine you're a female student traveling to school on an overcrowded bus. Suddenly, a man puts his hand on your shoulder and proceeds to slide it down your back ... and further.

You are scared and try to move away, but you can't do so because the passengers are crammed in like sardines.

What do you do? Look to a friend for help? Try to make eye contact with a stranger who might assist you? Silently count the seconds until you can exit at the next stop?

This situation is taken from the South Korean role-playing board game Li Zhihui's Life, recently translated and introduced to China by CITIC Press Group, a domestic publishing company.

The game features 32 scenarios in which a woman could face discrimination and sexual harassment, from childhood to old age.

The game is played by four to six people, who discuss how the fictional Li Zhihui should respond to each scenario by choosing one of the solutions offered－each of which has a points value. The player with the most points wins.

Li Jingyuan, who edited the game for CITIC Press Group, said: "We brought the game to China because Chinese women face the same dilemmas as their South Korean counterparts. It mirrors prevalent sexism, including sexual violations against women in real life."

Gwon Su-in, 28, said she created the game to mirror the experiences she and her friends have been through. "Players can get a feeling of the difficulties every woman faces in daily life," she said.

"Li Zhihui is a fictional character, but also a projection of myself. I created this game with the aim of informing others just how common sexual discrimination is in women's lives."

The Chinese version of the game was released at a time when sex crimes against women and young girls were making headlines in the two countries.

In March, South Korea's "Nth Room case" showed that dozens of women, including 16 underage girls, had been blackmailed into uploading sexually exploitative videos to chat rooms on the social media app Telegram. More than 260,000 users paid to download the videos.

On March 28, after Chinese media reports said five domestic websites were offering videos of sexually exploited children, the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications announced a crackdown on the production and sale of pornographic material. However, enforcement remains an uphill battle.

In April, a kindergarten teacher was arrested in Shanghai on suspicion of child sexual abuse. A man in his 60s was imprisoned for seven and a half years for molesting and raping two girls age 6 and 8, and a middle-aged lawyer was suspected of raping a then-14-year-old girl while acting as her foster father in Yantai, Shandong province.

Last month, a report jointly released by the China Foundation of Culture and Arts for Children's Girls' Protecting Project and the Beijing All in One Foundation found that 301 cases of sexual assault involving a total of 807 minors were reported in China last year, and that more than 70 percent of child sexual abuse cases are committed by family members or acquaintances.

From 2013 to 2018, the number of such cases topped 2,000.