Child missing after mother chained him up to keep him away from online games

What do you do when your 11-year-old child is addicted to online games and simply won’t stop playing? If you’re Guiyang’s Ms. Liao, you might try anything. Her son, Ah Mao, was so into online games that she started chaining him in his room for several hours a day to ensure that he didn’t sneak off to the local internet cafe to play games. Now, he’s gone missing.

Ms. Liao told reporters that after many other attempts to prevent Ah Mao from playing games, in March she took to chaining him to his desk at home for three hours a day. The three-meter chain attached to his leg on one end and the desk on the other, ensuring that he had freedom of movement in the small room but preventing him from sneaking out.

But this medieval method didn’t work for long. Ah Mao left home on April 18th and hasn’t been seen since. No surveillance cameras captured his departure, and he hasn’t since returned to school. No one has a clue where he is, and his parents have been frantically searching for him since the day he left. In the image above, his mother is holding up a missing person flyer with his picture on it.

Missing children are no joke in China, because even if they originally left home voluntarily, they can quickly become targets for child traffickers and other criminals seeking to manipulate them for profit (full disclosure: I made a documentary film about kidnapped and trafficked children in China). They can also become targets for serial killers, and internet cafes like the ones Ah Mao enjoyed frequenting have been where several of China’s most notorious child-abducting serial killers found their victims. And although internet cafes aren’t supposed to permit minors to enter, a Guangzhou Daily reporter covering this story found dozens of illegal net cafes in the area that were more than happy to take money from children despite the ban.

(Guangzhou Daily via Netease Games)