July 20, 2011 The ratio at birth between boys and girls
continues to widen in China. Families in poor regions find it
harder and harder to get brides for their sons. As a result,
trafficking of girls had increased tremendously in the last
several years. During the AGA volunteer’s anti-trafficking
campaigns, we found that the younger the boy, the easier he was
to sell on the black market, and at higher prices. Conversely,
the age at which girls were kidnapped had been increasing, and
some of the girls were kidnapped in their teens. Older girls
were worth more to traffickers and buyers because young girls
require years of rearing before they can become brides . The
price of girls had also increased manifold, from several
thousand yuan in the 1980’s to twenty or thirty thousand
nowadays, equivalent to prices paid for boys. But why didn’t the
trafficked older girls contact their families, when they should
have been able to remember their parents, school, hometown, even
home address and telephone numbers? The only