A tragic incident took place last month but the silence of the official media has been deafening. A brief report in the official China Daily is all that has appeared about the 14-year-old who committed suicide after being raped by her coach at a summer camp. The girl jumped to her death three weeks after her rape, probably unable to cope with the trauma of not only having been raped by someone she trusted but also being prevented from seeking help. As it often happens in such cases, the teenager told her parents nothing when she returned home. However, seeing her depressed, her mother inquired from others and learnt the horrific story. Apparently no attempt had been made to hide the crime. When the mother asked the child about it, the latter told her that the coach had raped her thrice over five days and she had been forced to take contraceptive pills. She had tried to escape to call the police, but the instructors had caught her. She had then turned for help to the camp counsellor but received no support. Two days after talking to her family, the girl jumped to her death while being comforted by them.
The coach has been arrested but, for the parents, “the sky has already fallen”, as the father put it. The mother later recalled that when the camp started, she could see her daughter in the photographs sent by the camp organisers to parents. Later, however, there was no sign of her in them. The horrific crime took place in a summer camp in a small semi-rural township in a backward province. The parents probably knew no better; they may not have heard of a case much like theirs which took place in 2018 in a summer camp held in Shanghai, organised by a Beijing-based company. A coach was arrested after the mother of 12-year-old twins accused him of having molested them.
Summer camps for students have become quite the rage among parents in the last five years. Parents see these camps, that last* between two weeks to two months in the summer vacations, as opportunities for their children to acquire ‘life skills experience’, to ‘toughen up’, or simply to procure an advantage in the race for admission to a foreign university. Given the competitive nature of Chinese education, most students do not spend time on outdoor activities once they reach middle school.
But there is little regulation when it comes to these camps. Tragedies have taken place earlier too: in 2021, a 16-year-old died of heat stroke on the third day of a hike through a desert. In 2020 and 2022, two boys aged 11 and 12, respectively, broke their bones while participating in exercises. The 11-year-old’s father went to court, making the camp organisers pay hefty compensation to the boy. In the case of the 12-year-old, who had been made to climb a wall without a safety harness, the organisers paid for his three-month hospitalisation. A camp instructor revealed that although she was trained in hiking, she was always nervous because of the number of children she had to supervise. “Sometimes, I can’t see the last child in the line of children walking behind me. Managements just don’t want to hire more instructors.” The tension had made her consider quitting her job.
A social media comment on the rape advises parents not to send their children to summer camps, which the writer compares to prisons run without supervision. Mocking the official silence over the incident, one netizen wrote that if asked, the authorities would probably talk about the rape of a doctor in India.
