In Zhengzhou, Henan Province, journalist Hong Weilin spent five months following the case of Chen Yue, a girl who left school at nine and, through social media, became involved with a group of underage dropouts known as “the circle.” Beginning in 2021, at just 11 years old, she was repeatedly raped, coerced into sex work, and pulled further into prostitution rings, while her parents remained largely unaware and then later unable to intervene.

Intensive interviews and judicial documents reveal Chen’s ordeals, her family’s neglect, and their failed attempts to bring her home. It also shows how online predators use similar tactics to manipulate vulnerable children, turning them into both victims and perpetrators of harm. The story highlights the inherent vulnerability of minors in digital spaces. It raises urgent questions about stronger parental oversight, effective safety nets, and how to ensure stronger protections for at-risk youth.

This in-depth 2024 investigation, which focuses on a social issue that has been largely overlooked in Chinese society, is a rare example showing that investigative reporting still exists in China despite the growing crackdown on independent journalism. Unexpectedly, the whole article is still available on WeChat.

About Positive Connections

Positive Connections is a Chinese online publication founded in 2021 by veteran journalists from Southern Weekly and GQ China. Operating with the standards of a professional newsroom, it focuses on overlooked yet vital social issues through long-form features and in-depth reporting. Its readership includes China’s emerging middle class, intellectuals, and students eager to understand social change. Publishing mainly on WeChat, Weibo, and other digital platforms, Positive Connections has gained recognition for its work, including the True Story Award in 2025.

An 11-year-old girl stolen from home

By Hong Weilin

Evil lurks by your side

 This is a complex yet significant case. From a judicial perspective, the facts are as follows: In February 2021, when Chen Yue was 11 years old, another 13-year-old girl introduced her to a 17-year-old male, who subsequently sexually assaulted Chen. A month afterward, another 12-year-old girl introduced Chen to another 31-year-old male, and Chen was sexually assaulted by him. Six months later, these sexual assaults then escalated into forced prostitution. Two years afterward, when Chen was 13, she was twice involved in prostitution rings, and is suspected of multiple violent assaults on others.

I came to Zhengzhou City in Henan Province in March 2024, where I stayed at a hotel in the city’s northeast side, not far away from Chen Yue’s home. I met with Chen, now 14, for three weeks, as well as her mother Zhang Jing. At the time, Zhang was busy campaigning for her daughter’s rights, and I went to three different police stations here, which each held jurisdiction over one of the three cases Chen was involved in.

After a week in Zhengzhou, I met two other suspects of roughly the same age and their mothers; the two girls were Xiaoyu, aged 14, and An’an, aged 16. The two girls gave me a vivid impression with the way they talked and acted, and in the case of An’an, her mother’s description of her was nearly exactly the same as Chen Yue’s. According to both mothers, their daughters were members of “the circle,” a close group of a dozen or so underage dropouts who would call each other up to play video games, sing karaoke, eat out, go on dates, and steal electric vehicles. Moreover, the group would often be involved in violent acts, sexual assaults, and infighting and snitching on each other. When Chen Yue dropped into this alternate universe aged 11, she witnessed girls around her being sexually assaulted by boys who liked them, and was herself also subjected to occasional beatings, or sold by her girl friends to strangers for sex. These were called “unlucky stuff” in the circle. After such “unlucky stuff,” the girls would cry, get themselves tattooed, cut themselves with knives, and continue mingling in “the circle” with a couldn’t-care-less attitude. In the past two years, the three mothers have tried their utmost to “rescue” their daughters, but their efforts have mostly been in vain—compared to what care their mothers could bring, the girls felt that they had a tighter companionship growing up with “friends” in “the circle.”

 To supplement and cross-check these accounts, I also interviewed Chen Yue’s father Chen Hao, her elder brother Chen Shu, her 17-year-old boyfriend Ah-zhe, a close friend in “the circle” Xiaohao, and a would-be client who tried to procure sexual services from Chen Yue.

 The following report is the result of five months’ work, and concerns the following issue: how evil forces come into contact with children at home via the internet, take these children away from home and bring them to harm (with their parents none the wiser), and usher them into an adult world of crime (beyond their parents’ grasp), until the children themselves become transmitters of evil.

How evil forces came into contact with children at home via the internet

I first met Chen Yue in March 2024 at a budget hotel near her home. As she entered the room with her mother, she had the restrained demeanour of a child being led by adults to meet a stranger, with her head held low and eyes darting here and there. At the time she was 14 years old, 160 cm tall, with long, straight hair, and a shapely body with a hint of a baby fat look. She nodded and said hello to me in a low voice, with a slight smile on her lips. From the looks of it, she seemed like any other ordinary school-going girl of her age. This made what she wore that day—a red jacket with two little devil-like horns and jeans—look all the more childish.

After saying hello, Chen Yue just stood there without moving. I sat on the bed with her mother, who told Chen Yue to sit down, and she sat on the sofa beside us. Her posture was like that required at school, with legs tucked in tight and hands on her knees.

Chen Yue was born in Zhengzhou in 2009, to parents who operated two general stores in a wholesale market. In addition to her, she also had two brothers, one six years older than her, the other 10 years younger. The family lived in an ordinary subdistrict in a well-off region about 20 minutes’ drive away from downtown, on the top floor of a six-storey building with no elevator.

According to a lady who knows the family well, as a child Chen Yue was always chatty and laughing, showing no fear of strangers, and gaining praise from adults for her witty talk. She liked to swim, and would sometimes visit a nearby swimming pool. After graduating from preschool, she enrolled in elementary school.

However, she dropped out of school by fourth grade. I asked Chen Yue, her parents, and her elder brother repeatedly why she did not finish her nine years’ compulsory education, and the reply was always the same: her grades were too poor, since she could never memorise words and their pronunciations, and she was expelled by the private school she attended. Chen Yue’s mother said she chose this particular school because of its emphasis on Chinese culture studies; in her understanding, schools that hold Chinese culture classes do not have schoolyard violence.

All four told me that after Chen Yue’s expulsion, her mother took her to a public school, but she failed the entry exam. She could, of course, attend another private school, but her father complained that private schools were not strict enough, and the tens of thousands CNY in tuition fees each year would be wasted if she did not learn anything.

After leaving school at age nine, Chen Yue was taken by her parents to help out at their general store. The store was inside a large open-air market with more than 500 vendors, with clothes, slippers, plastic bins, and cans of paint stacked high outside each storefront, while electric vehicles came to and fro. Chen Yue went to the store for a while but soon became fed up; she would rather stay at home.

Her parents had to take care of the store each day, so they had no time to look after Chen Yue. Soon after, Chen Yue’s mother Zhang Jing gave birth to another son, and they agreed to let her stay at home during the day, while also giving her a cell phone.

Chen Shu, Chen Yue’s elder brother who was now in junior high school, was the only one in the family who was roughly her age, yet the two siblings were hardly close. The two parents neglected all the children in the family, but each time a new child was born, they would clearly dote heavily on the newborn. Because of this, Chen Shu said he had always been jealous of his younger sister. Chen Shu himself had left home three times and dropped out of school out of spite, but later returned to study at a vocational high school.

In Chen Yue’s own words, she desperately wanted to go back to school: “Everyone else my age was at school, so what could I do stuck at home all by myself?” With no-one from school to call friends, the only thing she now had was a cell phone. Two years after she left school, at age 11, she found a few friends on TT Voice Chat, a voice-chat social networking app with a gaming component.

These new friends brought her into “the circle,” a group of a dozen to roughly three dozen underage youths aged 11 to 17. Although they came from different backgrounds, most of these teenagers were school dropouts, and lived near or around Road A where Chen Yue lived. Road A was nearly 6 km long, and took about one hour to traverse its entire length. This group of children, dropouts from different schools and scattered along the road, now found each other through the internet.

“The internet,” in this case, specifically means TT Voice Chat and the “In my city” function on the Kuaishou app; the latter uses algorithms to suggest people nearby of roughly the same age with common interests (nail art, tattoos, motorbikes, billiards). Moreover, the “common friends” function on Wechat was another driving force: this refers to a method that gained popularity with the post-2000 generation roughly five or six years ago, where people post their own photos and QR codes into chat groups or to others in their contact list, so that others who might be interested in them could directly friend them.

These new friends brought Chen Yue into a new world of nighttime visits to internet cafés, bars, night clubs, discos, and karaoke bars. Although the group had girls who were not yet 14, they could enter bars through side doors, or with a Photoshopped ID card. Following the lead of other girls, Chen Yue now learned to wear heavy makeup and black pantyhose, and play drinking games with other boys as deafening music played on. Eventually, she could drink more than half a litre of strong baiju liquor in one go.

No-one else in the family noticed what had happened to Chen Yue. Each time she left home at night, she would lock the door to her room, climb out the window and out onto the balcony, and head out through the toilet next door. She would only return late at night, long after her parents had gone to bed.

According to the China Internet Information Center, at the time many chat rooms on TT Voice Chat advertised “13-year-old hosts” who could “meet up” and chat about adult topics. Male users would hunt for underage girls on such platforms.

After joining TT Voice Chat, the 11-year-old Chen Yue soon met her first “partner,” although she did not know what it meant at the time. When the other person wanted to “meet up,” she thought this simply meant hanging out together. After actually meeting the person, she found out that he was only 19, and demanded sex immediately under threat of beating her up if she wanted to “break up.” Having no prior sexual experience, Chen Yue was “stunned silent” by the demand, and called for help from another girl in “the circle” who was only two or three years older than her. Under suggestion from this older girl, Chen Yue deleted the person from her contact list.

Of course, Chen Yue did not dare to tell her parents about this “bad thing,” since she was afraid she would be grounded and thus lose the few friends she was able to find. As such, her family knew nothing about the incident, which was already dangerously close to a sexual assault. Chen Yue continued to hang out with others in “the circle,” making new friends in the process.

I could sense that Chen Yue needed friends. Each time I met with her, she always treated me as if I were an age-old acquaintance, telling me—unprompted—about what has been on her mind lately, complaining about how she argued with her mother, or lamenting that some close friend of hers had now become distant. Once, when I forgot a certain detail, a feeling of sadness immediately filled her voice: “I told you already but you don’t remember.” However, the topic she loved to talk about the most was love itself. A self-confessed “loveaholic,” she would always be talking to me about boys she liked, whether we were sitting at the bedside, strolling, or leaning on a swimming pool wall for a rest. She would even ask me, “Do you have a boyfriend? What kind of boys do you like at your age?”

After a few months in “the circle,” a 13-year-old girl told Chen Yue to come out one day, because she wanted to introduce “a partner.” Chen Yue went with her.

That day was 19 February 2021. According to the court’s official judgement, this 13-year-old girl introduced Chen Yue to a 17-year-old male, who then took her to a hotel room only 10 minutes’ drive away from her home. Chen Yue was sexually assaulted in the hotel room.

Evil forces snatch a child away

After this first sexual assault, no-one told Chen Yue that this was, in fact, a “sexual assault,” and Che Yue herself did not think about reporting the incident to the police. To this day, her memory of the day is blank.

Later, she saw that the boy had a photo of a girl set as the background on his phone. She asked if that was his girlfriend, but he replied that it was an “internet photo.” She did not believe him: “Judging from how we find partners, I was cheated. I even lost my virginity to him.”

Chen Yue mistakenly calls this assault “a failed relationship,” which is how others in “the circle” told her to think.

Three others in “the circle” mentioned the concept of “fast love.” The practice, common among them, involves finding new relationships through friends, choosing partners from photos, and having sex the first time they meet. Many such relationships last for only one day, ending after the two involved have sex.

Why don’t they begin a relationship after spending more time with each other? Xiaohao, a 17-year-old boy and one of Chen Yue’s close friends, explains somewhat apologetically: this was because some girls “are afraid of (having sex) without confirming that they’re in a relationship.” To be honest, he says, he only wants to have sex. But according to Chen Yue and another 14-year-old girl, when the two girls first joined “the circle,” they believed instead that sexual intercourse would lead to a true relationship

Sometime in March 2021, a month after Chen Yue was first sexually assaulted, another 12-year-old girl told her to come out and meet another “partner.” Although Chen Yue initially refused, the other girl insisted that it was just for a quick meetup, and eventually she went. According to the court’s official judgement, the 12-year-old girl introduced Chen Yue to a 31-year-old male, who took Chen Yue to a hotel in the city centre, where she was sexually assaulted again.

This was a common occurrence in “the circle”: girls luring other girls out on false pretenses to be sexually assaulted by males. Chen Yue later found out why the girls did this: sometimes it was because a girl owed a boy a favour, sometimes it was for “introduction fees” that could range from hundreds to more than a thousand CNY. Some did it out of jealousy—according to Chen Yue, since “there are next to no virgins in ‘the circle,’” if someone was indeed a virgin, “the other ‘sisters’ would become jealous.” She once saw one of her friends lure another girl out, who was then unwittingly taken to a hotel room to have sex with a boy, while Chen Yue and other girls listened in in the washroom. The friend remarked, “How dare she stay a virgin, I’m going to take it away from her.”

In reality, the girls were passing on their trauma. After the girls were assaulted, no-one helped them to correctly process their experience, and thus they went on to hurt other girls. In addition, they had mistook “sexual assault” for “being in a relationship,” and abetting the assault of others merely became a lesser moral issue of cheating. In Chen Yue’s words, her sisters in “the circle” “did her in.” In grief, she would “disappear for two days” into hotel rooms around the city, where she would just watch TV all day and cease contact with everyone.

Yet after reemerging from her disappearance, she did not cut off ties with these other girls. I asked her repeatedly if she harboured ill will against them, and why she still went out with them. She wavered in her responses: sometimes she said she just did not know how to say no, sometimes it was because she was too young back then “and I really don’t understand what I was thinking.” In any case, she remembered that she did not want to lose her friends, “because I put all my feelings on them.”

I gradually came to a realisation: since Chen Yue dropped out of school at the age of nine, she had no connections with peers in school, which added to the lack of any close bonds with her family. Thus, the only companionship she could find was with other similar “lost” children among her circle. Even though they harmed her, they were nevertheless the only choice she had for devoting her feelings.

In April 2021, a month after she was sexually assaulted for the second time, Chen Yue said she was deceived again by the 13-year-old girl who was involved in her first sexual assault. This time, the girl told Che Yue to join her in a hotel room, then excused herself and left, leaving Chen Yue behind to be gang raped by two males. (The incident could not be confirmed by the courts, since Chen Yue did not remember the name or the address of the hotel.)

I was not able to get Chen Yue’s recollections of this incident. Zhang Jing, her mother, told me that Chen Yue would always resist when asked about it. One thing is for certain: her family was completely unaware even when the assaults became increasingly more severe: Chen Yue did not ask adults for help, instead choosing to remain among her “friends.”

One month later, in May 2021, Chen Yue thought that she had finally “met true love,” after three months of being deceived. L, a 13-year-old boy in “the circle,” said that he wanted to rent a place to live together with her. A dreamy-eyed Chen Yue left home to stay with L—many of the 12- and 13-year-olds in “the circle” left home like this to rent places of their own, by simply calling the number on rental ads. As Chen Yue said, even if they did not lie about their age, “those middlemen really didn’t care that much.” Under the sway of love, Chen Yue had sex with L.

In contrast with her previous three sexual experiences, this encounter came out of her own free will as a result of love. Yet she was only 12 years old at the time, still under the age of consent (14), and thus in the eyes of the judicial system L still committed statutory rape. This would count as the fourth sexual assault Chen Yue fell victim to in as many months.

Two months later, L began a new relationship with another girl, and Chen Yue said she felt extremely jealous and anxious. L held a special place in her heart, since the past two months were “the longest relationship I ever had.” Another two months later, Chen Yue finally saw L again, and felt that she needed to stay to try and salvage their relationship. Three other girls were with Chen Yue and L that day. After L complained that he had no money left, two of the girls went to steal an electric bike, which they then sold off. The five then used the money to go to a hot pot restaurant, after which L complained again that he had no money and no place to stay. L suggested that they pawn Chen Yue’s cell phone and redeem it when they had cash, which she agreed to. The five then used the money to stay at a hotel. 

The next evening, L complained yet again that he’d spent all his money. This time, he somehow brought a sex-buyer with him, and attempted to trick another girl into prostitution. This girl then threatened to call the police and ran away, so L told Chen Yue to step in. In Chen Yue’s words, L told her, “Do this once and you’ll have your cell phone back,” otherwise “I’d lose my phone forever.”

“I really don’t remember why I agreed to this. My dad bought me my phone, I was afraid he’d never buy me anything else,” said Chen Yue.

The day was 21 September 2021. After being raped and gang raped, Chen Yue was now a victim of forced prostitution. She was sexually assaulted by three sex-buyers that night, before the police arrived in the early hours of the morning.

Failed attempts at prevention

By the time Zhang Jing realised her daughter was in trouble, Chen Yue had already been sexually assaulted four times. One day in May 2021, her eldest son Chen Shu showed her a video on his phone and told her to “keep calm”: Chen Yue had just posted a clip on the short video sharing app Kuaishou, of her sleeping with a boy—this boy was L. Chen Yue had not been forced into prostitution at this point, but had only just “begun a relationship” with L.

Zhang Jing was “dumbfounded” by the video. After “coming to,” she immediately summoned Chen Yue to ask if she had had sex with anyone. Chen Yue initially denied everything, but when Zhang Jing insisted on taking her to the hospital for a checkup, Chen Yue finally admitted to the four sexual assaults. In addition, she mentioned that a 12-year-old girl introduced her to her second encounter. Zhang Jing knew this girl: she had often come to visit Chen Yue at their home in the two months before this, and would often stay over at night; Zhang Jing even made meals for her. Although Zhang Jing recalled that the two girls often came home with heavy makeup, she initially thought that they had both been fooled into doing so. Now that she found out the truth, she immediately contacted the girl’s mother. The two mothers then promptly called the police.

The first two perpetrators were quickly apprehended, and received sentences of 18 months and 42 months respectively. The third case was dismissed due to lack of evidence. The fourth case was also dismissed, since L was under 14 years of age.

However, according to Zhang Jing, the police told her that the 12-year-old girl was not a fellow victim, but rather had actively deceived Chen Yue. The girl had shared Chen Yue’s sex video among her circle of friends, along with a note: “Lemme know if you like this baby.” She pocketed 1,000 CNY acting as an intermediary in this way. The girl could not be criminally punished, as she was also under 14 years of age.

A furious Zhang Jing went to the girl’s home to demand an answer. The girl’s mother said, “So we made a mistake, what else do you want us to do?” Zhang Jing also confronted L’s parents, who replied, “Our son is less than 14 years old, there’s nothing anyone can do about him.”

What made Zhang Jing even more furious was her daughter’s reactions: Chen Yue seemed completely oblivious to what had happened. When the police were gathering evidence at the hotel, Chen Yue looked as if this had nothing to do with her, and even played around with the girl who tricked her, whom she seemed to still treat as a friend. When the police bought a milk tea for Chen Yue at the police station, she even said that she wanted to save it for the other girl.

In Chen Yue’s words, at this point (i.e. before she was forced into prostitution) she still believed that “L truly was in love with me,” but “my mom was so mad and was prepared to sue him.”

After the judicial proceedings concluded, Zhang Jing kept a close eye on Chen Yue at home, aiming to bring her daughter back on track under her control. But Chen Yue could not accept being isolated at home: Zhang Jing recalls that Chen Yue would often uncontrollably cry and howl, cut the sofas, bedsheets, and furniture at home with a knife, and even slit her wrist more than a dozen times. Zhang Jing tried to talk and engage with her daughter, but received no response.

I asked Chen Yue what she felt at the time. Although she said she felt “very depressed,” she could not remember why: “There are lots of memories that I can’t connect to.” She felt as if “in a trance,” like “there were two people in my head, one telling me to kill myself, the other telling me not to.”

For days on end, Chang Jing tried to look for a solution on Douyin (China’s domestic version of TikTok), until she found a “military-style youth academy” on the city’s east side. “It was like a juvenile detention centre,” she said. According to its website, the school is a closed-off correctional education institution that targets 10-to-18-year-olds who “misbehave, don’t go to school, are addicted to their phones, are socially awkward, are selfish and unrepentant, begin intimate relationships too early, are too introverted or apathetic to their family, spend money without thinking, beat their parents, are lazy and impulsive, or run away from home,” using a curriculum that stresses “learning, understanding, obeying, and applying the law,” and “understanding, being grateful for, and being willing to accept their blessings.” Being a woman of action, Zhang Jing immediately enrolled Chen Yue in the school.

Before Chen Yue entered the school, Zhang Jing took her daughter to a hospital for a psychiatric checkup. According to the report issued by the Zhengzhou No. 8 People’s Hospital, Chen Yue was diagnosed with severe depression. Even so, Zhang Jing sent her daughter off, since the school replied that she was accepted after they had seen the report, although she did remind the teacher at the school to let her daughter receive counseling.

Three days later, a police officer who knew about the situation told Zhang Jing that sending Chen Yue off to such a school would ultimately damage her. Hearing this, Zhang Jing went with the police officer to the school to bring her daughter back home. Chen Yue had trouble walking when they brought her out, a possible sign that she had received corporal punishment.

After the failure of this solution, Zhang Jing later followed advice from a friend, and sent Chen Yue to a temple in Fujian Province, hoping that the temple authorities could help rein her daughter in. By coincidence, she found out that the woman in charge of cooking meals at the temple also came to the same hometown, so she told Chen Yue to call the woman her godmother, and then left a few hundred CNY. Chen Yue stayed at the temple for two months, where she helped wash dishes, cook, and recite Buddhist mantras.

The two months flew by, and soon Chen Yue was back at home. Since Zhang Jing did not have the time to keep an eye on her daughter, she had her 18-year-old eldest son Chen Shu to keep Chen Yue company. According to Chen Shu, Chen Yue was ill-mannered and had a range of bad habits, such as smoking. “If I tried to talk some sense to her, she’d never take it seriously, and sometimes she’d even talk back to me. She’d often go on a rampage and throw stuff around at home, and I’d become so angry that I would beat her with a belt or charging cables, hoping that this would bring some sense to her.”

In Chen Yue’s own words, the time she spent under the custody of her brother was even worse than what she had experienced at the temple, the military school, or in “the circle.” She felt she had no other choice but to run away: “Outside, I’d maybe (get hurt) once every couple months or so, but at home I’d get a beating almost no matter what.”

One day in March 2023, Chen Yue began a relationship with another boy on her cell phone, but denied it when confronted by her elder brother, who then beat her again out of anger. According to Chen Hao, the children’s father, the beating was so severe that he told his son to stop. Although Chen Hao had almost never taken part in his daughter’s education up to this point, this time he decided to hold a family meeting, where he scolded his son for beating Chen Yue, and forbid him to speak up. The relationship between father and son thus took a turn for the worse, and Chen Shu said that it was as if he never had a little sister from that point on. Chen Hao said that he would be responsible for watching Chen Yue henceforth. 

Custody of Chen Yue was thus passed on to Chen Hao, after her brother failed in his attempt. The very next day, Chen Hao took Chen Yue back to their old home, where she was kept in isolation. He also took away her cell phone.

A few days later, Chen Hao realised that the iPhone he had taken away from Chen Yue had been replaced by a dummy. In a fit of rage, he snatched the phone from Chen Yue’s hands and smashed it in front of her. 

Chen Yue picked up the phone, its screen now shattered, and used a voice command to summon Siri and call a friend named Xiaorong. This 13-year-old girl, another member of “the circle,” had rich experience in running away from home; in Chen Yue’s words, she could escape “just by going to the toilet.”

Xiaorong told Chen Hao that she came to bring dinner for Chen Yue. Not only did Chen Hao believe her story, he even told her to stay for the night, out of concern for her safety.

That night, Xiaorong told Chen Yue, “Why are you staying at home like this? Look at me, I’m all out and about.” She said that she could take Chen Yue along to “hawk orders”: find clients online who want to pay for sex, pretend that they are willing, but actually run away as soon as they receive payment. Many girls in “the circle” use this method to get quick cash (another common method was to steal electric vehicles). Chen Yue agreed: this sounded exciting, she had nothing to lose, and she would be free from her family’s grip once she had money.

The two girls escaped that very night. The next morning, Chen Hao discovered that her daughter had disappeared under his nose.

However, Xiaorong did not take Chen Yue along to “hawk orders.” Chen Yue was, once again, the victim of deception, yet this time it was even more serious—she had now been ushered into the adult world of a prostitution ring.

The mother

Zhang Jing, 47, had her hair done in a tight ponytail, and wore a black top with sheer sleeves, white pants, high heels, and bright red lipstick. Upon a closer look, the first impression of a strong, capable woman gives way to a gaunt, sallow countenance, which she said was due to years of insomnia. Whether talking to me, the police, the lawyers, or the many people she has had to confront while defending her rights, she always begins with the same sentence: “So much has happened to her these past two years.” This is followed by a detailed account of what her daughter has been through. She always speaks without pausing for breath, until she seems about to faint from lack of air and has no choice but to stop and breathe heavily.

Likewise, she also spoke of her own travails: a failed business venture these past two years resulted in losses of more than one million CNY; she divorced her husband late last year; her father is in the terminal stages of cancer; her elder brother has been hospitalised with kidney disease; and she herself was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022, which has remained untreated since she “couldn’t find peace of mind.”

Zhang Jing came from a farming village in Xinxiang, Henan Province. She first found work as a migrant labourer, then began running a street stall. Later on, she married Chen Hao, who came from an even poorer farming village, and was working as a security guard at the time. The two eventually opened two grocery stores together. Only after her marriage did Zhang Jing learn that her mother-in-law was paralysed and suffered from a mental condition; she often stayed with them, where she would curse and throw feces at those around her. Zhang Jing became her primary caregiver, and thus the relationship with her husband began to deteriorate.

In Zhang Jing’s words, she wanted to get a divorce but could not bring herself to do it. Out of “despair,” she gave birth to two children to “give myself some hope.” She became obsessed with multi-level direct marketing, since the organisation offered “motivational courses.” Seven or eight years ago, the business led to the loss of a home costing some 500,000 CNY, which was followed by the loss of another 500,000 CNY home after investing in a startup project by a speaker in the direct marketing circle. Now living in rented lodgings, the family has racked up hundreds of thousands CNY in debt. This was what led to their divorce, according to Chen Hao, who was afraid of being implicated in her debt. Even so, Zhang Jing has no regrets: without encouragement from her direct marketing circle, she says, she “would not have found the will to live.” Even now, she often talks with the speaker whom she invested in, a woman roughly the same age as her, saying that she gives out “positive energy. 

In private remarks, Chen Hao told me that he felt Zhang Jing and Chen Yue were very similar. Both mother and daughter depend heavily on friends, and are particularly gullible: “Say three sentences to them, and they’ll see you as friends, four sentences and you’ve become friends greater than life itself, even just two sentences is enough to comfort them. Their greatest weakness is being easily deceived.”

Zhang Jing’s main regret is not spending enough time with her children. Aside from making ends meet, she has spent most of her time and effort dealing with her own emotional issues. Unprompted, she told me that she often beat up Chen Shu when he was little, since she could not control her temper, and whenever Chen Shu’s school had parent–teacher meetings, it was always her grocery store employees who went instead of her. When Chen Yue was little, she often returned home very late from attending multi-level marketing courses, and thus neglected her daughter’s studies.

After her mother-in-law passed away in late 2020, Zhang Jing thought she could finally “catch a breath” since she no longer had to care for her, yet soon afterward she learned that her daughter had been sexually assaulted four times. Looking back, Zhang Jing recalled that Chen Yue had begun cursing and smoking four months prior to this, but she felt that this was “like mother like daughter”: her daughter had just caught some temporary bad habits, much like catching the flu.

When she learned that Chen Yue had been sexually assaulted four times, and now seeing Chen Yue crying and harming herself at home, Zhang Jing felt her feelings change. Just like the protagonist in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, who becomes an insect overnight, Zhang Jing now suddenly felt a pang of estrangement and fear: “Physically she’s still my daughter, but her heart no longer is.”

Unable to make sense of the sudden change, Zhang Jing even began to think that her daughter was possessed by evil spirits. As a woman of action, she immediately took Chen Yue to a temple in Anyang. After touching Chen Yue’s hand, the “master” at the temple told Zhang Jing that a “spirit” was in possession of the child, which would cause her to “know nothing about what she has done.” This gave Zhang Jing some comfort, yet the problem still remained.

The visit with the “master” left Zhang Jing with a further sense of helplessness. Now she was even afraid to be alone with her daughter, since she “didn’t know how to face it all.”

In any case, she was not able to keep an eye on her daughter 24 hours a day. As soon as she was left alone at home, Chen Yue would slip out and not return for the night.

Zhang Jing eventually fell into depression herself: she suffered from insomnia whenever Chen Yue disappeared, and would have nightmares whenever she managed to fall asleep. In her dreams, her daughter would inevitably have been killed outside, and she could not find her. Once she dreamed that her daughter was dead; when she opened up the grave, she saw her daughter naked from the waist down, and tearfully asked her why she had to die half naked.

Whenever she saw a girl walking outside during the day, she would be fearful that the girl might fall victim to sexual assault, then wonder why other girls ended up fine; whenever she saw a boy, she would think they were all scum, and suspect every single male person on the street had molested her daughter.

She would criticise herself as well. Whenever she saw the scars on Chen Yue’s wrist, she would blame herself for not taking better care of her child: “I’m not worthy of being a mother or a woman.”

Even more than self-blame, however, was the sense of shame and ensuing desire for revenge. She felt that a healthy child had been unwittingly snatched away from her, and now her dignity and entire life lay trampled on the ground. To date, none of the perpetrators have apologised to her, and she feels that the verdicts have failed to provide justice: in the first two cases of sexual assault in 2021, the two perpetrators received sentences of 18 months and 42 months in jail respectively, which she believes were far too lenient.

Furthermore, in each case the court awarded her 542.5 CNY in damages, a sum that she considers humiliating. Although the prosecutor advised that she could contest the decision, she decided not to, since the most she could get in compensation would be just a few thousand CNY.

The amount of 542.5 CNY was calculated like this: contrary to how most people think, psychological damages are usually not awarded in criminal cases; only medical costs are. After Zhang Jing found out that Chen Yue had been sexually assaulted, she took her daughter to the hospital for an examination, which cost her 1,085 CNY in total. This amount was then divided among the two perpetrators, meaning that they each had to pay 542.5 CNY.

According to the Criminal Code, the sentence for raping an underage girl ranges from 4 to 7 years. But the two perpetrators received lighter sentences because they both confessed to the crime, plus one was underage himself at 17 years of age.

Zhang Jing could not accept the sentence. She insisted on appealing, which returned the same sentence. In the three years afterward, she has put her work aside, instead lobbying the authorities full-time for a retrial. She has also repeatedly insisted on prosecuting the other two sexual assault cases in 2021 (the third case with lack of evidence, and the fourth case, in which the perpetrator L was under 14 years old).

Time and time again, she insists that “this is a matter of dignity.” A recent phone call trampled her dignity yet again—the call came from the mother of the 31-year-old perpetrator, who realised that they had not paid the 542.5 CNY, and said that she could “add her on WeChat and wire her the money.”

Zhang Jing took me to the three police stations that were each in charge of one of the cases. At each police station, she repeated to the officers there the full account of what her daughter had been through. She would also often call other officers whom she had previously contacted, to repeat her accounts again and again. Once, when Zhang Jing went out to take a phone call, one of the police officers said to me, “She always comes in with a lot to say, but you never understand what she wants to say.” Another time, when Zhang Jing and I were in my hotel room, a police officer interrupted her in a phone call, telling her to keep her words brief. Her plaintive tone suddenly turned accusatory, and the phone call became an argument.

Zhang Jing spent nearly all her effort in the long fight for her rights, but to no avail. In the meantime, Chen Yue was left alone one more, and fell even deeper into the abyss. On an early morning sometime in March 2023, Zhang Jing received a call from husband, who was phoning from their old home: their daughter had disappeared yet again. 

Two months later, she received another phone call, this time from the police: Chen Yue had been lured into a prostitution ring.

Adult world of crime 1.0:
The price of fun and freedom 

On the night of 19 March 2023, after Chen Yue successfully ran away from home, Xiaorong took her to see one of her “big brothers.” This man was Tao, a 36-year-old from Xichuan County, Henan Province. Tao told the two girls to follow him; he would take care of their food and fun. He took the two girls to a love hotel called “Beauty Fashion Hotel.”

The hotel had already been shut down when I visited the area. It was located on a street lined with shops, just a 10-minute drive from Chen Yue’s home. The lobby was adorned with golden walls, purple leather sofas, and advertisements for painless abortions. A sign at the entrance advertised it as a “Safe Hotel.”

According to the court’s official judgement, Tao operated a prostitution ring out of Beauty Fashion Hotel, with three minors involved in roughly 24 transactions. 

This was a fully operational crime ring run by adults. In addition to Tao, who headed the operation, the hotel owner was aware of the activities and provided the venue, and even introduced friends to solicit sexual transactions. The owner of a nearby foot massage parlor and a local KTV client manager regularly referred clients to Tao as well. All three accomplices were male.

The clients were mostly middle-aged men from the surrounding area, including acquaintances from the girls’ everyday environment. (Chen Yue even recognised a client as a neighbor of her parents’ shop in the market, and said this “scared me so much that I ran away.”)

“Sexual services” thus entered the world of 13-year-old Chen Yue. In her words, at the time she “didn’t think about resisting, it didn’t seem to matter,” because Tao had a 17-year-old sidekick with him, a boy from “the circle” who was known for being a thug. She didn’t want to get beaten up, and she didn’t want to go home either, because her brother would beat her there too.

She also had to think about survival. If she didn’t go home, she had to take care of rent and living expenses herself, a challenge she often faced when she ran away in the past. When Tao offered her 100 CNY per day on top of food and lodging, she believed it was a good deal. She had no concept of money until three weeks later, when she happened to glimpse a transaction record on Tao’s phone, and realised each transaction actually cost 600 to 700 CNY.

For a long time, I struggled to understand how such trivial “benefits” could make Chen Yue accept sexual transactions. Later on, while reviewing legal documents, I saw more statements from girls of the same age involved in this case, including a 12-year-old girl who came to the hotel one day to hang out with Chen Yue and Xiaorong, after the latter two started taking clients. Tao likewise said he would take care of food and fun, using this as enticement to rape her. Even though the girl had no prior sexual experience, her account was even more casual than Chen Yue’s: “I thought he could buy me a phone and give me some money, so I had sex with him. 

I began to understand: from the perspective of children who never received sex education, entertainment and freedom are important, immediate needs worth paying a price for. For Chen Yue, the price she had to pay was not real—she had no concept of what sex work was, or what consequences it might bring. As long as she was certain she could have fun and use a phone, she felt there was no big problem.

At the same time, life in “the circle” had caused Chen Yue and Xiaorong to become immune to their surroundings. Both had witnessed girls selling their bodies to boys, and even girls selling out other girls. Although Chen Yue felt that“girls selling out girls” was not a good thing, it was “just normal” because “a lot of people around me do it.”

Chen Yue began “working” at age 13, taking one client per day. By now, she suffered more physical and mental harm than ever before. After just one week, her periods came every ten days or even less, as taking too many contraceptive pills made her menstrual cycle irregular. Moreover, Tao forced her to take clients even before her period ended, complaining that she did not make him enough money.

Tao and his thug sidekick also regularly forced the girls to have sex with them “off hours,” often in front of other girls. This constituted rape, as indicated in the court’s official judgment. Around midnight one evening, the sidekick called in two “friends” who took Chen Yue out. In a pavilion in a wooded area, the two “friends” (both aged 18 with criminal records—one for stealing electric bikes, the other for telecom fraud) attempted to sexually assault Chen Yue. Their attempt failed, but not because Chen Yue resisted: the two received a call from the sidekick, who told them to bring Chen Yue back to “work” because a client had arrived.

Chen Yue told me that two or three weeks after she started to take clients, she was still hesitating about running away. “I could if I wanted,” she said, but after being through all this, she was even more afraid of facing Zhang Jing, Chen Hao, and Chen Shu at home. If she did not go home, she would have nowhere to go and no money to live on. Ever since she ran away from home, Zhang Jing had been asking her every day on WeChat where she was. Chen Yue lied, saying she was at a friend’s house. Although Zhang Jing promised to never let Chen Shu hit her again, she would alternate between begging her to come home and threatening her: “Your whole family will disown you if you don’t come back.”

Even so, Zhang Jing did not go to the police right away. Chen Yue had run away from home too many times over the past two years; at first, Zhang Jing always called the police immediately, but now it no longer felt like a bolt from the blue, even though she would still lose sleep. To some extent, she gradually accepted that she had failed at being a mother, now that her daughter no longer wanted to come home. In her words, her husband Chen Hao would even tell her, “Maybe Chen Yue is leading the good life out there.” Zhang Jing would keep messaging her daughter on WeChat every day, while also reminding herself to let go: “Just let her enjoy herself, she’ll come home once she’s been through too much outside.”

The nearly daily abuse Chen Yue suffered at Beauty Fashion Hotel ultimately dulled her senses: she no longer felt shocked, but instead accepted it as a way of life, just as she had done with every new trauma since age 11. Chen Yue said that later on she simply felt that sex “didn’t matter anymore,” although “no-one would be happy if it happened so frequently.”

There were moments when she decided to escape. The sidekick noticed and asked her, “Do you want to make Tao sad? Didn’t he treat you well enough?” Any adult would see the absurdity in these questions, but they were enough to stop 13-year-old Chen Yue in her tracks. In her words, she remembered when Tao had been kind to her—he would always take her side whenever she argued with Xiaorong: “He stood by me, so it was never a fair fight.”

One day in May 2023, Zhang Jing realised that “letting go was too hard,” and finally called the police.

This month-long ordeal of forced prostitution finally came to an end. Tao fled before the police arrived, and the manhunt lasted several days. After nearly a week of inhuman life on the run—no SIM card in her phone, sleeping at construction sites at night, and forced to have sex with Tao and his sidekick along the way—Chen Yue was finally rescued by the police. Tao was sentenced to 15 years for organised prostitution and rape, while the sidekick received a sentence of 2 years and 5 months. Chen Yue returned home with her mother.

Adult world of crime 2.0:
Twisted perceptions

The first time Chen Yue became involved in a prostitution ring, she had no idea of what was happening. This time around, though, she believes she now understood “the rules of the adult world.”

A few months after being rescued by the police, her close companion Xiaorong introduced her to  Dragon, another crime boss. Dragon was around 23 or 24 years old, physically strong, and often appeared unhappy. In addition to organised prostitution, he was also involved in contracting construction projects. According to Chen Yue, Xiaorong had run away from home so many times that her parents had given up on her, and she turned to prostitution to survive. By contrast, Chen Yue simply didn’t want to stay at home. However, Dragon was not as easygoing as Tao: “He immediately forced me to take clients, or he’d beat me,”said Chen Yue. Out of fear, she followed through with one job. Thus the two girls again fell into the world of adult criminal exploitation.

A 17-year-old gang member told me that “bosses” use five main methods to control girls:

1. Recruit attractive young men to seduce girls into romantic relationships, then convince them to “earn money for love.”
2. Recruit “sisters” who pretend to offer protection and lend money, then demand repayment through prostitution.
3. Use “sisters” to lure other girls under the guise of friendship (as Xiaorong did with Chen Yue).
4. Alternate between abuse (beatings, humiliation) and affection (meals, gifts) to create cognitive confusion and emotional dependency.

In the above four methods, violence is distorted into the care and companionship that the girls yearn for, so that they are unable to leave. The final step is:

5. Take nude photos, videos of beatings, or even videos of sex acts to blackmail the girls and prevent them from leaving.

These tactics are similar to those used to manipulate adult women in prostitution rings, but minors are far easier to control and offer nearly no resistance.

Another 14-year-old victim, Xiaoyu, claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Dragon, but was not involved in prostitution. Xiaoyu’s mother showed me two videos from last summer.

In the first video, shot on a rooftop, two girls (Dragon’s “sisters”) force Xiaoyu to the floor, stomp on her, slap her face with slippers, and drag her along the floor while yelling at her: “Still want to call the police? Take off your clothes.” They count down, and Xiaoyu strips naked and stands up.

In the second video, at night in a grassy area, the same two girls repeat the beating. Dragon, standing nearby, tells the girls to stop, and the two girls giggle and look down at their shoes. As Xiaoyu lies face-down in the grass, Dragon says, “This is just her first beating, plenty more will follow.

Now under constant psychological manipulation, with the people around her always switching faces, Chen Yue could no longer distinguish between affection and abuse. When her mother wasn’t around, Chen Yue told me she had feelings for Tao. According to her then-current boyfriend Ah-zhe, Chen Yue also told him that she had feelings for Tao’s sidekick. I believe him, because Chen Yue secretly signed a document forgiving the sidekick, which she hid from her mother. Since she was underage, though, the document had no legal effect.

As we grew closer, Chen Yue shared a secret with me: she had once fallen in love with a client, a 22-year-old man who both bought sex and pimped girls for money. Chen Yue fell for him because he said he “wanted to be in a relationship” with her. In her eyes, he chose her above all the other girls in the trade, which meant that “he wasn’t after my body, but my soul.” She felt that she was valued and recognised: even though their first meeting was during a paid sex encounter, and he tried to persuade her to work for him, a few days later he claimed he “loved” her, which she believed. After “being in a relationship” for just one day, however, the man was arrested for raping another girl. Chen Yue could not believe that he did such a thing, and was devastated by the loss of her “lover.” Later, she heard from other girls that the accusation was false; believing the rumor to be true, she felt her pain ease. She blamed her failed romance on the girl who slandered him: “If I ever see (the girl), I’ll beat her up.”

Throughout similar patterns of abuse, the girls see each incident as a story of love and heartbreak.

After Chen Yue and Xiaoyu, I met the mother of a 16-year-old girl named An’an. An’an was also lured into Tao’s ring, and was sexually assaulted by Tao (though she was not involved in prostitution). Yet when she arrived at the police station, she insisted she was in a romantic relationship with the thug sidekick. A police officer told me, helplessly, “She’s still trying to downplay it and protect them.” Like all the other mothers of girls who suffered the same fate, An’an’s mother was devastated not just by the facts, but even more so by her daughter’s reaction: in desperation, she kept repeating, “I really don’t understand.”

An’an’s profile on the video sharing app Kuaishou still has photos expressing her affection for the sidekick—his name is tattooed on her fingernails and one wrist, while the tattoo on her other wrist says, “He’s the only one I’ll ever marry.”

“Gregor Samsa woke up and discovered that he had been changed into a monstrous bug”

Now that Chen Yue had accepted sex work as a means of survival, she became increasingly “unfamiliar” in the eyes of her family, who found it increasingly difficult to face her, even treating her as an object of fear and rejection.

In Zhang Jing’s words, she first learned of Chen Yue’s involvement in sex work in May 2023, when police rescued her from Tao’s trafficking ring and notified her to come pick up her daughter at the police station. She admitted that she didn’t want to go: at that moment she could only think, “I don’t want this child anymore, both her body and soul are tainted.”

At the station, she held her daughter and cried. Mother and daughter slept together that night; Chen Yue came over to hug and kiss her, but Zhang Jing said she didn’t respond—she felt “completely dead inside.”

A few days later, just after turning 14, Chen Yue said she wanted to rent her own place and work at a hair salon. This time the family did not object. In Chen Yue’s words, she could feel that her family did not know how to interact with her: “The atmosphere was simply too suffocating.” She decided to only rely on herself from then on: after that day, whenever she left home and could not make ends meet, she would naturally follow her “sisters” in taking clients, and would force herself to do it even when she did not want to.

Meanwhile, Zhang Jing was tormented by the word “prostitution.” She told me multiple times about an incident in the courtroom, when a lawyer defending one of Chen Yue’s rapists referred to her as a “prostitute.” Zhang Jing said she nearly fainted upon hearing it: “I had nowhere to hide. I couldn’t face anyone. I wanted to leave this city.” Her face twists in pain every time she recalls the incident.

Zhang Jing also believes that, to be fair, she has also been hurt by her daughter: “What Chen Yue did has brought me lifelong shame and emotional trauma.” This feeling of shame would sometimes ebb out at home. Chen Yue told me that she once wore a Japanese-style school uniform, and her mother said she “looked like a Japanese whore.” It was the first time she heard her mother speak in such a tone, which caused her to collapse onto the floor in tears.

Zhang Jing would also occasionally show signs of understanding. In her account, she experienced sexual violence herself before marriage: one night when she was drunk, one of her then-to-be husband’s friends took her to a hotel and tried to assault her. She managed to protect herself by threatening to jump out the window. Years later, however, her husband admitted that he had arranged the incident to “test” whether she was promiscuous, because they were planning a quick marriage. In Zhang Jing’s words, “The whole ordeal will haunt me my entire life.”

As Chen Yue drifted further and further away from the image of a “perfect victim,” Zhang Jing became increasingly unfiltered. She told me that after learning her daughter had sex with her underage boyfriend, she scolded her, “You’re ruining that boy. It’s not enough that you’ve ruined your own family, you’re ruining others too. Look at what you’ve become now, and you’re still sleeping around with boys. They’re still underage, they have no idea this is a crime.”

After this altercation, Chen Yue also felt that Zhang Jing became “unfamiliar” and difficult to face. Perhaps as a form of rebellion, Chen Yue began to casually use the word “sell” in conversation. When introducing a friend, she would say, “She’s a seller,” or “She probably sold too.” When referring to a certain time, she would say, “When I was selling with so and so…”

During my three weeks’ visit, Zhang Jing’s attitude toward her daughter fluctuated wildly. When we first met, she said this was the happiest she had been in a while, because her daughter was at home: “She loves me the most, and I love her the most.” She said she would tell her daughter, “I will never give up on you no matter what.” Just a few days later, however, she told me, “I really don’t like seeing her now,” later on even remarking, “Sometimes I wish she were dead.”

Each time Chen Yue ran away, Zhang Jing would show extreme mood swings in her WeChat messages. Sometimes she would plead, “Give mommy one more chance… I can’t live without you!” Yet at other times she would send a long rebuke: “Why don’t you ever come home?… Are you waiting for me to die? Or do you want to ruin the reputations of my husband and son?… My precious daughter is already dead. I’ve let go of you… We’re finished from now on!”

Yet no matter which emotional extreme Zhang Jing was in, her desire for revenge never faded, and she has continued to take action. When she confiscated Chen Yue’s phone late last year, she found 18 suspected sex clients in her WeChat contacts: these all had a “v” in front of their names, likely a mark Chen Yue used to keep track of her clients, and all had financial transaction records with her. Zhang Jing decided to investigate each one.

On the afternoon of our 13th day together, Zhang Jing suddenly asked me, “Can you come with me to meet one of the sex clients?” She showed me chat records between Chen Yue and the man in question: he had been in frequent contact with her over the past few months, sometimes sending up to 16 messages a day, in which he asked her to introduce other girls around her age, specifically those over 14. Zhang Jing pretended to reply as Chen Yue: “But I’m only 13.” The man replied: “Are you messing around with me?” Eventually, Zhang Jing arranged a time and place to meet him.

The client appeared on 19 March 2024 at 2 p.m., outside a hotel near Wanda Plaza. He looked nearly 50, and wore glasses and a polo shirt like a middle-aged businessman. According to his social media profile, he was a liquor distributor, and was married with two sons, one in middle school, the other in university. As he walked out of the hotel lobby and into his car to drive to the basement garage. Zhang Jing called him: “I’m Chen Yue’s mother. Turn around this instant, or I’ll call the police!”

“Is that necessary?” he replied, then hung up. The car never returned. Zhang Jing sent another message demanding that he “face the truth.” The next day, the man blocked her on WeChat.

One day, I learned by chance that late last year, Zhang Jing had already confronted a client and reached a settlement. The man was a 60-something owner of a traditional medicine clinic. When Zhang Jing confronted him, he knelt down on the spot and offered compensation. Later on, Zhang Jing even partnered with him in a fireworks business. 

I asked if I could meet this man. Zhang Jing agreed and drove me to the clinic, a small concrete building in a residential area, with a sign advertising traditional weight loss and breast enlargement remedies. The door was shut, and the phone remained unanswered. While we waited, Zhang Jing said that during the Lunar New Year holiday, he sent her a pork leg and a fish. “He said he’d treat Chen Yue like his own child.”

I could no longer hold back. “Don’t you feel disgusted when you see him?”

“Yes.” Zhang Jing fell silent. After a while, she seemed to summon all her strength to say, “Since 2021, I’ve thought about killing myself so many times. Nobody has ever really tried to save me—not one person.”

“He gave me compensation. At least that part is over. I can move on to the next person. I don’t even know how many people have slept with my child.”

Then she started the car.

The two male members of the family

I originally thought that the male members of the family would have a stronger reaction, and be more active in defending the rights of a girl who has suffered abuse. Yet after I arrived in Zhengzhou, I soon found out that Chen Hao—Chen Yue’s father—had never been involved in the fight for her rights. According to Zhang Jing, her husband knew very little about what had happened to their daughter, and whenever she tried to tell him, he would reply that he did not want to listen. Whenever she lost sleep because Chen Yue ran away from home, he would simply tell her, “Just take care of yourself, just knowing that she’s alive is enough for us.”

The first time I met Chen Hao was at a family gathering with friends, though I didn’t know he was there. Around a round table sat eight people, and across from me was a tall, heavyset man who didn’t speak and kept his head down eating. Since he never interacted with Zhang Jing or Chen Yue, I assumed he was just a distant friend. Two days later, I told Zhang Jing I wanted to meet Chen Hao. She said, “Haven’t you already met him?” I then realised that the silent man at the table was Chen Hao.

I heard the same description of Chen Hao from Zhang Jing, Chen Yue, and Chen Yue’s brother Chen Shu: he was always busy doing business, rarely involved in family matters, and generous—even indulgent—with material support (always giving pocket money, or letting the kids play on their phones), but otherwise emotionally absent. After what happened to Chen Yue came to light, Zhang Jing concentrated her focus on her daughter, and Chen Hao put more energy into his work now that he had to take care of both stores.

One evening, Chen Hao agreed to talk with me at home. He wore a dark blue T-shirt and looked plain. I asked if he felt he had been absent in Chen Yue’s upbringing, to which he replied, “It’s not that I didn’t try. I tried both gentle and strict approaches, but nothing worked.” When he saw the scars on his daughter’s wrists, he said, “I don’t know what approach to take.”

He repeated his emphasis: “As a man,” he said, “I’m out there, I take care of big things. Household stuff, emotional stuff, I don’t want to talk about it.”

I pointed out that Chen Yue was still a vulnerable 14-year-old girl. “Of course we all understand that,” he nodded. But, he added, he had sensed that something was wrong with Chen Yue over the past two years, but he “didn’t want to know about it” and “hoped it wasn’t real.”

The other male member of the family was Chen Yue’s brother Chen Shu. Aged 21, Chen Shu was unemployed, spending his days locked in his room playing video games and studying how to grow a following on Douyin. I wanted to get a sense of how he understood the abuse Chen Yue suffered. Zhang Jing helped bring him out of his room one afternoon. Judging from Chen Shu’s appearance, he did not look like someone who would beat up his sister—he was thin, wore glasses, and had a gentle appearance. He spoke very little, noting that he was very introverted because he received little love from his parents while growing up. He always felt inferior growing up, since no-one cared even if he had holes in his shoes or his clothes were dirty.

Chen Shu didn’t express outrage over Chen Yue’s abuse. In his words, he did not know much about Chen Yue’s behavior, but “I resent that she’s hurt my mom, she worries all the time and can’t sleep.” Moreover, he and Chen Yue had never gotten along: their parents always favored her,  so that “just hearing her name would make me sick,” and he was thus forced to grow up early. He always looked at Chen Yue from the vantage point of an adult, treating her as a “problem girl.”

He still insisted that he was correct in beating her, even though this approach to discipline ultimately failed. Now he no longer wanted to be involved in her matters, and had ceased speaking with her: “From my point of view, her problems have nothing to do with me anymore.”

Although Chen Yue stayed at home during my three weeks in Zhengzhou, she rarely saw her family. She would go to bed at dawn every day, and only rose around 3 or 4 p.m. in the afternoon; this, she said, was so that she could avoid her family. One afternoon, I entered her bedroom, which was filled with Hello Kitty items: ashtrays, stickers around the full-length mirror, and a plush toy by the bed. Aside from a single bed and a desk, however, there was little space. The entire family’s laundry hung by the window, blocking the light so much that it looked like night, even though it was actually 3 p.m. in the afternoon.

This was the kind of surroundings Chen Yue found herself in after leaving the trafficking ring and returning home: a mostly absent father, a brother who avoided her, and a mother who kept a close eye on her and and refused to let her go out, which became a constant source of friction between mother and daughter. The home was very different from before her time in “the circle,” when nobody bothered to keep an eye on her. One thing remained the same, however: no-one kept her company.

Each day, Chen Yue would wake up and lie in bed, scrolling through funny videos on TikTok and Kuaishou. Sometimes she sat up to do her nails. Soon it would be dark, and she would go to the living room to have dinner with the family, the only meal of the day for her. If she got hungry, she would buy instant noodles and sausages from the convenience store. After dinner, she would walk her corgi around the neighborhood, then return to her bed and continue watching videos and movies on her phone. She watched most of her movies by random, forgetting the titles the next day and the plots a few days later.

One movie she did not forget about was Deep Sea, an animated feature about a girl who was neglected at home, only finding comfort in her dreams. “The captain in her dream cared more about her than her dad did.” She said she slept so much because she did not want to face reality.

Sometimes she secretly took high doses of a hallucinogenic cough medicine, which could give her a dream-like feeling as in Deep Sea. Once, she took 24 pills and saw her room turn into a maze she couldn’t escape, and her recently-split ex-boyfriend flew in on a helicopter to rescue her. “That hallucination, that feeling of happiness—it lasted the entire night.”

An underage lover seeks revenge

Violence first crept into Chen Yue’s life in late 2023. She was in a relationship with a 17-year-old boy named Ah-zhe, whose father was abusive toward him and his mother. Ah-zhe himself had violent tendencies as well.

Once, when Ah-zhe suspected Chen Yue of cheating, she jumped from the second-floor stairs of an internet café and tried to limp away, but Ah-zhe chased her down and grabbed her by the neck. He choked her again during a second incident, when he suspected she was engaging in prostitution. Both incidents ended up at the police station.

Even though Chen Yue knew that beating others was wrong, she was reluctant to break up with Ah-zhe, because she had not found a replacement yet. In her world, a lover was something she needed every single day, just like food or sleep, because she needed someone to talk to “when I feel I’ve suffered at home.” Since her mother was confining her at home, she could not go out alone, and had no friends. Her only emotional support was her relationship.

A week after I arrived, Zhang Jing drove me to meet Ah-zhe one evening. By this point, Ah-zhe and Chen Yue had been together for over three months. In the car, Zhang Jing told me that Ah-zhe was also part of “the circle,” had pledged loyalty to a “big brother” (i.e. crime boss), and had recruited about a dozen younger “siblings” himself. Ah-zhe knew about the abuse Chen Yue had suffered. Zhang Jing often asked him about the latest in “the circle,” and even enlisted his help in her investigations. Ah-zhe cooperated with her requests to “make friends over drinks,” aiming to gather evidence supporting harsher sentences.

We pulled over and Ah-zhe got into the car. He was over 170 cm tall, with thick eyebrows and large eyes, and had just finished a shift at the front desk of a hot spring hotel, his first formal job. Soon after getting in, he started talking about how he was “dealing with” the men who had slept with Chen Yue: staking them out while keeping his face obscured with a hat and a mask, beating them up, and then threatening, “If you go to the police, I’ll let them know you’re a rapist.” In his account, during the month or so he has been doing this, he has beaten up four people, none of whom have reported him to the police.

Ah-zhe admitted to beating Chen Yue. His moral mindset came from his family, the internet, and “the circle”: according to this view, physical violence is acceptable—even normal—and not incompatible with love. Raping girls and organizing prostitution rings were “beastly” acts he would never do, but selling girls to do hostess work at bars (which he claimed to have done) was acceptable as “a normal job.”

Ah-zhe had dropped out of vocational school shortly after enrolling. In his words, he felt that he was “in another world compared to the other students.” Other students had clothes and snacks in their suitcases, yet he had a stun gun, a telescopic baton, and a large knife. He immediately dropped out of school.

Two weeks after our meeting, Chen Yue and Ah-zhe broke up after an argument. Ah-zhe asked to meet me at a bar one night to talk about his frustrations. He handed me a new set of pajamas he had bought for Chen Yue, asking me to give them to her without saying they were from him. After an hour of drinking, he turned melancholic and said that even if they hadn’t broken up, he had no future with her, because he had stolen electric bikes, smashed a shop, smuggled laughing gas, laundered money for telecom scammers in Myanmar, and stabbed someone, but had never been caught. I could not verify any of these claims.

He said he wanted to take revenge on Chen Yue’s abusers and then go to prison.

“Do you know what going to prison means?”

“I’ve been in a detention center for fighting. The people inside treated me well. One guy who was in for theft even taught us how to pick locks. When I was about to leave, they all clapped and said, ‘Don’t let us see you back here again!’”

“But prison isn’t the same as a detention center.”

 “Detention centres have shared sleeping areas. Prisons have bunk beds. Frankly, prison is more comfortable than the detention center.”

Malice

Chen Yue first began beating others up at age 13, following what her “sisters” were doing. By age 14, she was beating up people frequently.

She had only been on the receiving end of violence before age 13. When she first entered the “the circle,” aged 11, she was beaten twice within two months. The first time, a girl suspected Chen Yue of being involved with her boyfriend; along with a close friend, the two dragged Chen Yue to a private cinema and slapped her repeatedly, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Later, three boys aged 14 or 15 broke into her home while her parents were away and beat her up. These two assaults occurred in between the four sexual assaults in 2021.

The 11-year-old Chen Yue thus understood that if someone appears weak, “anyone can stomp on them” until they learn to “fight back and become strong.” When she was around 12, she bought a knife, and went with two of her “sisters” to beat up a boy who had bullied her pet dog. They ended up fracturing the boy’s brow.

Chen Yue began getting tattoos at 13 to give herself an appearance of toughness. Her first was a small red dot on her wrist—a “cinnabar mole” which “meant I was still a virgin,” she said. Her second tattoo was a Hello Kitty flipping the middle finger. Even though this one covered her entire wrist, her “sisters” mocked her for not going big enough, so she got a full leg piece for her third tattoo: a giant Hello Kitty wrapped in a snake. Within a year, her body was covered in nearly a dozen tattoos large and small.

She frequently took part in group fights from age 14 onwards. The reason was always the same:  according to Chen Yue, when someone in “the circle” calls for backup in a fight, not showing up means being excluded and losing friends.

In October 2023, Chen Yue and two sisters beat up a middle school girl in the underground passage of a shopping mall. The girl was hurt so badly that her right eye was bloodshot, her lips turned black, her face was swollen, and her body was covered in bruises. Afterward, Chen Yue said she actually did not know the girl, but threw two or three punches anyway, otherwise she was afraid that her sisters would think she “wasn’t loyal enough.”

A few days later, the beaten girl’s father reported the incident to the police and publicly called for help online to search for the perpetrators. Netizens uncovered Zhang Jing’s TikTok account, and Zhang Jing, Chen Hao, and Chen Shu all received abusive messages.

Zhang Jing was interviewed by the media as the parent of a perpetrator. “I’ve run out of options. Honestly, I hope the police detain her, and maybe even send her to juvenile detention,” she told reporters.

Now that the family had become associated with a violent perpetrator, the emotional balance within Chen Yue’s household tipped completely. Chen Hao would tell Zhang Jing, “Quit worrying, she’s out there hurting other people’s kids now.” Chen Shu also believed Chen Yue was now no longer a victim: “She just wants to be one of those people.”

After three weeks of intensive interviews and reviewing judicial documents, I can confirm that at least five underage girls I encountered followed the exact same trajectory as Chen Yue: they were first exposed to “the circle” through social media, then experienced physical assault and sexual abuse, were later tricked into prostitution rings, and eventually became perpetrators themselves. According to juvenile psychology expert Li Jian, cases of youth violence often end up with victims becoming perpetrators themselves: when children are harmed and receive no external support to escape from violent environments, they must redirect the pain to survive. If they do not find a target for their pain, it will become unbearable, since “if you don’t explode in silence, you perish in silence.”

These children received no protection or support during their long periods of victimization. But after being in “the circle” for a year or two and becoming perpetrators of violence, they must bear the consequences alone—after age 16, assault carries legal responsibility. Chen Yue said that many of her friends, including An’an, have already “gone in.”

“It was all my own choice”

On March 10, 2024, one week after I arrived in Zhengzhou, Zhang Jing said to me: “Can you find someone to help us? My child needs a school to take her and psychological support.”

Between March 11 and March 22, I contacted a child rescue organisation, a girls’ rescue organisation, a sexual assault survivor support group, the city’s psychological support hotline, a judicial social worker who works with the prosecutor’s office, and the judge handling Chen Yue’s case. None of them were able to provide support, each citing different reasons.

The Zhengzhou Women’s Federation said they could arrange for someone from the local community office to visit the home and offer psychological assistance, but Zhang Jing lost the phone number they had given her.

Funding and professional capacity were the obstacles in some cases. One nonprofit organisation said the girl needed comprehensive support until she turned 18, including psychological care, education, and family guidance, but very few organisations in China currently have the capacity to   handle individual cases like this, and many may not have adequate funding. 

Other efforts were hindered by procedures and regulations. The judicial social worker said they could provide case tracking, but only during the prosecutorial phase, since they work with the prosecutor’s office. Yet by this point, Chen Yue’s case had already been transferred to the court. 

Chen Yue turned 15 in early May. She is now bearing the cost of the past four years of her life.

This includes the physical toll—she took too many contraceptive pills during her time in prostitution, which have caused a series of health issues. Earlier this year, she became pregnant during a relationship with a 16-year-old boy (Ah-zhe’s immediate predecessor). She underwent an abortion.

There is also the psychological toll—her depression has not improved, and she still cuts her wrists with a small knife.

And then there is the cost to her entire life—Chen Yue said that this year she began to “regret mixing with the street crowd,” because her friends have been going to prison one by one. “I used to think it was ‘normal’ for girls to recruit other girls into prostitution,” she said; also “normal” were domestic violence and cohabitation with a partner at age 13 or 14. She has finally learned that these were not normal. However, she still has trouble reading and writing. One day she mentioned a market she often visits, called “Guangcai Market.” When I asked her which characters were in “Guangcai,” she fell silent. Is it the “guang” that means light? Maybe. Is it the “cai” that means colorful? Maybe, she said.

One night, as we walked home in the middle of the night and talked about the “wrong turns” of the past four years, Chen Yue insisted that everything was her own fault.

That night she first talked about Xiaorong, her former “sister” who had nowhere to stay after running away from home and gradually ended up in prostitution. “Her situation was her own doing,” she said.

I told her no—such things are not the responsibility of a 13-year-old girl.

Chen Yue then told me two stories about how Xiaorong “initiated” sex with boys. “Why did she get slept with? It must have been her own fault.” 

“And what about you?” I asked. “Do you think it was your own choice too?”

Chen Yue stared ahead, silently. After a while, she said, “It was all my own choice. I can’t blame anyone else.”

I shared this conversation with the psychology expert Li Jian, who gave me the following opinion: Chen Yue does feel hurt now, but the way she understands harm is different from how adults do. At 14, she is unable to comprehend that she was supposed to receive an education and grow up healthy. The harm was that these most basic of rights were stripped away. She also doesn’t yet understand that it was society and her family’s responsibility to protect those rights. She will understand when she grows up—that will be when the harm truly surfaces and engulfs her.

*With the exception of Li Jian, all names have been changed to protect the privacy of minors.
*The author would like to thank Chen Canjie and Girls Protection for their assistance.