Internet addiction met with death and violence at unregulated schools

When her parents sent Guo Lingling, 19, to the Zhengzhou-based Boqiang New Concept Life Training School (Boqiang), they were expecting her to return cured of her Internet addiction. Instead, she came back in a body bag.

Founded in 2004, Boqiang is a "special training institution" to help adolescents with problems such as Internet addiction, "school weariness" or autism, using counselling as its main teaching method.

However, what Guo experienced in the last two hours of her life was non-stop physical punishment. Her autopsy, according to Beijing-based newspaper The Mirror, revealed that Guo's death was caused by cranio-cerebral injuries due to repeated contact between her head and a hard object, known as "falling forward" or "falling backward."

Five people from Boqiang were detained for "intentional injury and causing death," including Guo's counsellor Ma Yanfei and the vice principle, surnamed Kong. Medical records suggest that Guo was dead before she arrived at the hospital; her family didn't get to meet her for the last time. Boqiang had stipulated that children couldn't meet or call parents throughout the course.

Guo's mother, from Xinxiang, Henan province, later learned from the police that Guo was given extra "training" for taking bathroom breaks, due to diarrhoea, and not reporting them to teachers as per the rules.

Boqiang lays down strict regulations on students' training and lifestyle; even students' diaries need to go through review. Anyone breaking the rules is subject to physical punishments by the instructors.

A roommate of Guo told The Beijing News that she would see students receive all kinds of physical punishment every day. During her final "training session," Guo was repeatedly picked up and dropped until she was unable to stand - supervisors continued even after she began to allegedly throw up blood.

Boqiang's license was revoked about a month after Guo's death, and more than 70 students sent to the school for being "problematic and disobedient" regained their temporary freedom.

Several students reached by The Beijing News called life in Boqiang "hell." But many parents haven't changed their minds: to them, only an iron rod could help train their children to behave.

Nightmare

Boqiang's prospectus was what attracted Guo's mother. According to the school, it has successfully transformed the lives of over 3,000 problematic adolescents and earned such honors as "The Best School of Correcting Problematic Adolescents" or "The No. 1 Education Brand in Central China for Delinquent Children."

A staff member said that "knowledge training" is not Boqiang's main strength, according to The Mirror. The report also revealed that it charges 5,500 yuan($833) a month and a common training period of six months, a total expenditure of 33,000 yuan.

Some are tricked into attending. Fu Xiaokai, a student of Boqiang, said he was told he needed to testify at a police station about a fight he witnessed. But after getting in a car, Fu was taken to Boqiang instead.

There's no psychological counseling in the school, Fu told The Beijing News, adding that within two months, only one unidentified person had listened to Fu talk about his family.

Fu remembered the feeling of "falling forward" and "falling backward." "All your bones in the arms are shaken and you can hear a buzzing in your head when you touch the floor," he said.

He claimed to have "fallen forward" 1,000 times for not reporting a visit to the bathroom. He had a mouthful of blood after injuring his tongue during previous training.

Many students try to escape and some of them even used extreme ways to self-harm, such as swallowing ink or detergent, and fasting.

"Six months in Boqiang was like being cast away on a deserted island," a former student, Lin Hao, was quoted as saying by The Beijing News. "Expecting a boat to save you every single day, but no one comes."

Blossoming industry

Guo's death has once again put these special training institutions under the spotlight. Over the past years, the "problem-child correction" business has grown bigger and bigger in the country.

There are at least 300 similar schools and institutions nationwide with different methods to treat Internet addiction, Tao Hongkai, an education professor at Central China Normal University, told The Mirror.

Many parents are eager to send children to these institutions without knowing even anything about them, Tao said, adding that forceful measures could only make children hate their parents and society.

"We've helped many children from those institutions and, besides failing to beat their Internet addiction, they came out with other problems."

Experts believed that the industry has made a huge profit, since there are about allegedly 4 million people with serious Internet addiction in China. However, with all kinds of agencies and people jumping into the business for the profit, chaos has resulted from a lack of proper management or regulation.

Guo is not the first victim. At least another 11 similar cases have been reported since 2008, with seven deaths including Guo, The Mirror added.

In 2009, 15-year-old boy Deng Senshan of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region died just eight hours after being admitted to a training center in Nanning, where Deng's parents hoped he could get rid of his Internet addiction.

Better way out

Fu's father said that it was a pity that Boqiang was shut down, finding no problem with its educational objectives and methods, as long as "the physical punishments were not too heavy," The Beijing News reported.

Father and son had a dispute in mid-June after the father began checking around for similar institutions. "I am worried that you would get bad again," Senior Fu told his son.

While stressing that parents should pay more attention to family communication and education while treating Internet addiction, Tao also called for strengthened supervision on these institutions.

"There should be a thorough review on these institutions, and related standards need to be set up," he said.

In addition, psychological counseling is what matters the most in treating Internet addiction, Tao added, and institutions should adopt a "scientific way" to actively guide sufferers.