Chinese teacher is suspected in months of schoolgirl rapes

Jim Yardley:

The teacher always sent a girl to buy his cigarettes. He left the class unsupervised and waited in his office. When the girl returned to class with flushed cheeks and tousled hair, the other students said nothing.

For nearly three months the teacher, Li Guang, raped 26 4th- and 5th-grade girls in this rural village, parents and court officials say. Some girls were raped more than once; Li attacked them in a daily rotation. He was found out when a 14-year-old refused to go to school for fear the next morning would be her "turn." She did not want to be raped a third time.

"School is where our children learn," said Cheng Junyin, the mother of the 14-year-old. "We thought it was the safest place for them."

It is the sort of horrific case that in many countries would be a national scandal but in China has disappeared into the muffled silence of state censorship. That silence matches the silence at the heart of the case: the fact that students considered a teacher so powerful they did not dare speak out.

Indeed, even as the conventions of Chinese society are being shaken by the tumult of modernization, the Confucian reverence of teachers remains strong, particularly in isolated areas like this farming village in Gansu province in western China. Parents grant teachers carte blanche, some even condoning beatings, while students are trained to honor and obey teachers.

"The absolute authority of teachers in schools is one of the cultural reasons that teachers are so fearless in doing what they want," said Yang Dongping, a leading expert on China's education system.

Yet modernization has helped drive many teachers away from the poorest areas like Gansu. Low pay in rural areas and better opportunities in cities have caused teacher shortages in many poor areas. One study found that 35 percent of village teachers leave within three years.

Poorer schools are left to hire cheaper teachers, many of them only marginally qualified, a trend that has coincided with a disturbing string of sexual abuse cases. Yang said beatings were far more common than rape, but he noted that in 2003 the Education Ministry published a list of 10 cases in which teachers had raped students.

In December 2003 a teacher in rural Shaanxi province was executed for raping 58 girls in 15 years. In October a teenage girl in rural central China tried to commit suicide after a teacher forced her to watch him rape her cousin.

Li, 28, may go on trial by the end of June, according to a court official in Dingxi, the city where the case will be heard. If he is convicted he will face a prison term of at least 10 years, or possibly the death penalty.

Local education officials as well as prosecutors refused to be interviewed about the case, other than to confirm that the trial would be forthcoming. China's state-controlled news media have remained silent, except for a short initial newspaper article that reported Li's arrest.

But a visit to this village found families who vented their anger at such a violation of trust. The village is nearly six hours from the provincial capital, Lanzhou, the last three hours on a dirt road through the mountains.

Farming is the primary livelihood, and families often delay sending a child to school to avoid the fees. Girls are usually the first to be kept home, and some do not start school until age 9 or 10. Li's 4th-grade class had about 50 students, of whom about 26 were girls, with ages ranging from 10 to 14.

The rapes lasted until the morning Cheng Junyin's 14-year-old daughter refused to go to school. Word began to spread through the village. Jiao Zhencai, 35, said her 12-year-old had been raped twice. Yet she said the girls had been too frightened to confront the teacher.

In the conservative culture of rural China, the shame of rape has been devastating for many families. Some have refused to talk to prosecutors or get involved in the case. Others fear that their daughters will be forever damaged, including when they reach marrying age and may be stigmatized.

Jiao may have the most difficult time forgetting what has happened. Her neighbors are Li's parents. She said they came to her home after their son was arrested and warned her not to talk about the case.

She said she told them: "Everybody has children. What if this had happened to you?"

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