Nearly one million children in China have at least one parent in prison. Many of them are "de facto orphans" who lack any parental care or any support from the country's social security system. A Beijing NGO is trying to help these children heal and repair their relationships with their parents.
It took a whole year for 10-year-old Min Ling and 17-year-old Min Xin (pseudonyms) to visit their father behind bars.
The sisters, from a city in Northwest China, are shy about expressing their emotions, shunning strangers and rarely speaking to others.
"Min Xin always looks standoffish. People who know her say it is not easy to get along with her. I guess it is because of her eyes, where she hides too many stories to read. You can feel the coldness even when she is smiling," Wang Xin (pseudonym), a social worker and childcare expert, told the Global Times.
In 2009, when Wang and some friends started an NGO to help migrant workers and their children living in cities, she heard the phrase "prison mission" for the first time from a foreign friend.
"I had no idea what he was talking about," Wang recalled. But six years later she found herself helping thousands of children like the Min sisters who have been virtually orphaned by the prison system.
"De facto orphans"
Three years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province two girls were locked in their home while their mother, a drug addict, went to get her fix. Their father was in prison. The girls' emaciated bodies were found by police days later. They had starved to death.
There are many prisoners' children who receive little parental support and are "de facto orphans." A 2006 report from the Ministry of Justice (MOJ), the only national-level official report about prisoners' children, said there are at least 600,000 children with parents behind bars in China. Some experts have argued that this number is likely close to 1 million by now.
According to a 2011 survey conducted by the Family and Child Research Center at Beijing Normal University, the number of "de facto" orphans is around 580,000, almost equal to the country's official number of orphans.
The MOJ report said that at the time 94.8 percent of these children had never received any kind of support and many were suffering from physical and mental trauma.
The report added that 46 percent of their parents got divorced after one was sentenced to a jail term; 78 percent of these children live in households with a monthly income less than 900 yuan ($135); 82 percent of these children dropped out of school after their parents went to jail; and 2.5 percent of them become homeless.
A 28-year-old woman whose father is a convicted murderer, told the Global Times that when she was growing up she was often abused by her relatives who labeled her a "murderer's daughter."
"You can't imagine how many nights I cried myself to sleep and the damage it has done to my life, which persists to this day," she said.
A guard at a Shanghai prison who asked not be named told the Global Times that prisoners' children are ignored by the legal and civil system. The officer, who used to work at a juvenile reformatory, said such children are more likely to commit crimes than their peers.
"The vacuum left by of their parents makes it more likely they will befriend 'bad guys' who lead them down the wrong path," he said.
After the Nanjing incident, the Ministry of Civil Affairs tried to include prisoners' children in the social security system by treating them as orphans. But according to China's current laws and regulations, an "orphan" is strictly defined as a child whose parents are dead or missing. This means that prisoners' children cannot be sent to orphanages or adopted even though they may have no guardians to look after them.
Last year, in a groundbreaking case, a Jiangsu local court transferred a child's guardianship to the local civil affairs authority after her mother failed to do her parental duty while the girl's father was in jail.
