If you’re going to liberate a little girl from a horrible sex trafficker then you need to be really, really sure that’s what’s going on, because otherwise you’re just kidnapping her, like these two laowai in Shanghai did over the weekend.
The story broke on Weibo on Saturday when user @tinaanddavid posted that her husband and a friend had been approached by a woman and a small girl in a bar in Jing’an District trying to get the two foreigners to pay to have sex with the five-year-old girl. The laowai rejected the offer and then grabbed the girl and phoned the police “who simply asked them to release the girl, much to the duo’s consternation”.
The foreigners were appalled, as were netizens who forwarded @tinaanddavid’s original post hundreds of times, here were the Chinese police callously returning a victim of sex trafficking to her pimp. Except they weren’t, because the girl wasn’t selling sex, she was selling flowers, and the woman wasn’t her pimp, it was her aunt, a florist (Chinese source).
It was suggested that the two expats may have misheard the English word “six” for “sex” as some young girls selling flowers at downtown bars sometimes charge five or six yuan for a bunch of flowers.
The original Weibo post appears to have been deleted, though a later update by @tinaanddavid does seem to be referencing the case, defending the men for having good intentions.
[Via: Beijing Cream]