Baby Is Bundle of Proof

The day Guo Shunyou became a grandfather should have been one of the happiest of his life. But when his daughter gave birth in November to a healthy boy--normally a prize in a rural village like this--Guo saw it as an emblem of shame, a stain on his family’s honor.

His daughter, Yanfeng, is only 14. She did not bear her son out of love, or desire, or even her own free will. She had the child on her parents’ orders, for another reason entirely: evidence.

The baby, the family says angrily, is the product of rape--and their best hope of seeing justice done in a case where the odds appear stacked against them.

The Guos say the man who fathered the child--one of two men who, they say, repeatedly assaulted Yanfeng--is a villager with ties to the local government.

So when police offered to perform a DNA test on Yanfeng’s unborn fetus, which would identify the father yet allow the girl to have an abortion, her parents demurred. What if the suspect used his connections to sabotage the investigation? Perhaps some obliging official would conveniently lose the blood sample or mix up the lab results.

Guo and his wife, uneducated peasant farmers, took the only path they thought offered any chance of success: They told Yanfeng to have her attacker’s baby, who would be living proof of her rape--and a source of blood for further DNA tests if anything suspicious happened to the first.

It was a gamble fraught with risk to the girl’s physical and emotional welfare. “My daughter is a child herself,” said Guo, 51. But he saw no alternative. “We just don’t trust the police. We need to keep the evidence.”

What happened to Yanfeng, and her parents’ quest for justice, is a tragic tale that illuminates some of the darker corners of China’s rapidly changing society, problems ranging from the nation’s spiraling crime rate to the economic and social stagnation gripping the countryside.

But at root it is the story of one family’s loss of faith in a legal system so rife with corruption that ordinary people sometimes feel compelled to go to extraordinary lengths to get a fair shake.

Corruption is the scourge of the Communist Chinese government, which is riddled with low-level officials willing to turn blind eyes and bend the rules in exchange for money. Last year, 40,195 officials were investigated for graft and bribery, with half of them found guilty and punished, the country’s top prosecutor reported this month.

The public routinely ranks official sleaze as the No. 1 problem in the country--above disruptions stemming from entry to the World Trade Organization, above China’s rivalry with Taiwan, above even the upswing in violent crime. Trust in government institutions is low. As central authority loosens and the race for riches grows more heated, cash and connections have become the ultimate arbiters in society.

This has made justice especially hard to come by for people like the Guos, who are poor--which is to say powerless.

The family feels completely outmatched by the prime suspect in the rape of Yanfeng, a villager named Ma Wenzhong who, they say, has both cash and clout.

“We have nothing,” Guo Shunqing, Yanfeng’s uncle and the family’s designated spokesman, complained bitterly. “We can’t find any honest and upright officials here. . . . No one speaks for us.”

Even by Chinese standards, the Guos are impoverished. Home is a tumbledown structure with earthen walls, a cracked tile roof, few furnishings and a dirt floor that no amount of sweeping can keep clean. There are two small bedrooms, one off either side of a living room so narrow that a grown man can stretch out his arms and almost touch both walls.

In the yard, some chickens, a pig, a goat and a dog paw the dust, while a recalcitrant goose stands tethered to a tree, a leash looped around its webbed foot.

If their harvest of rice and green beans is good, the family earns about $120 a year. But rain has been scarce lately in this pocket of central China, and so has the Guo household’s income.

Yanfeng, an only child with rosy cheeks and a ponytail, has not set foot in school since kindergarten. Her family cannot afford it. To a visitor, she appears to be mildly retarded, but getting a diagnosis of her condition lies beyond her parents’ means.

So while her peers diligently memorize Chinese characters and learn complex math, Yanfeng tends the family’s sheep in the hills around her home, which is where her ordeal began.

Starting in the winter of 2000, her family says, Yanfeng was violated by two men on separate occasions while she was watching the flock. Taking advantage of her apparent mental impairment and her naivete, Yanfeng’s attackers warned her that they would kill her family if she breathed a word about what had happened.

Terrified, she stayed silent--and continued to be raped--for months.

Then, last summer, Yanfeng’s appearance started to change. Her parents, at first, did not recognize her condition for what it was. “We just thought she was getting fat,” her father said.

Only after a skeptical cousin brought the girl to a clinic did the family discover she was pregnant. And only after repeated questioning did she reveal who was responsible.

“She refused to say, so we kept at her,” her uncle recalled. “Her dad threatened to beat her to death if she didn’t tell. Then she spoke.”

Caught between the threats of her attackers and the threats of her father, Yanfeng identified her assailants as Ma and another village resident, Li Rongjie.

The family hustled to the police June 30. Both men were brought in for questioning. Li confessed to raping Yanfeng but insisted that the child could not be his because he is infertile. He remains in custody.

Ma denied any involvement. Irate, he demanded to be allowed to confront Yanfeng face to face. He accused her family of slander and threatened to have Yanfeng’s uncle locked up. Citing lack of evidence, the police let him go.

The Guo family is convinced that Ma, 65, pulled strings in the township government, where his nephew works, and bought off police and officials with gifts of food and alcohol.

So when investigators told Yanfeng’s family that she could go ahead with an abortion and that a blood sample could be taken from the fetus, her parents hesitated. “We knew a DNA test could be done without delivering the baby, but we don’t trust the police,” the girl’s father said.

The police tried to talk the Guos out of having their daughter carry the child to term. Local family-planning officials also applied pressure, warning that the parents could be fined if they allowed their daughter to give birth without official permission.

But on Nov. 21, Yanfeng checked into the township clinic, underwent four hours of labor and delivered her baby--then checked out two hours later. “Of course I was worried about her health,” her father said glumly, pulling at one cigarette after another during an interview. But “we couldn’t afford to let her stay at the hospital.”

The birth cost $35.

A month later, the Guos brought Yanfeng’s baby, helpless and nameless, to the county authorities to have blood drawn, as they were told to do.

But to collect samples from the two suspects, police went to the jail, where Li was being held, and then to Ma’s home, where blood was taken behind closed doors and without outside witnesses present.

The Guos were suspicious. “How come we, the victims, had to travel to the county to have the blood taken, but Ma Wenzhong, the suspect, just stayed at home and had the medical examiner draw his blood with the door closed?” Yanfeng’s uncle said.

The township authorities deny any wrongdoing. An official in the local prosecutor’s office, who gave only his surname, Liang, insists that the police followed proper procedure. He added that the case had been handled with the utmost care because it involves an underage girl.

Hong Daode, a legal expert at China University of Politics and Law in Beijing, said resolving such a dispute should be simple.

“The problem is a lack of transparency; get an independent third party involved to, say, monitor the blood-taking to be sure that the blood comes from the right person,” he said. “There should be nothing secret about such a procedure.”

But in China, local police bureaus are notorious for flouting the rules. Human rights groups allege that torture of suspects is widespread, especially during national anti-crime drives such as the current “Strike Hard” campaign, during which hundreds of criminals have been executed over the past several months.

Even the state-run media here, emboldened by calls from the top for police accountability, have run sensational stories highlighting the problem of police abuse.

Sometimes obscured, though, is the fact that police suffer from a lack of resources so serious that proper, scientific crime detection is next to impossible. Officers are ill-trained and ill-paid, making them more susceptible to bribes. Many police stations do not have cars or even cameras, let alone advanced equipment such as lie detectors, fingerprint sensors or computers. The blood samples in the Guos’ case had to be sent to a city more than an hour’s drive away for processing.

The verdict, when it came just before last month’s Chinese New Year, proved their worst fears: Neither of the two suspects was the baby’s father, the authorities said.

The family rejects that outcome, saying it is tainted by bribery and impropriety.

“We weren’t even allowed to see the test report. We were simply told the result,” said Guo Shunqing, the girl’s uncle.

The family insists that Yanfeng could not have had sex with anyone else. They have demanded another, independently administered DNA test, which the authorities have not yet approved and which may depend on whether the Guos can scrape up the money for it themselves.

So for now they are holding on to the baby. Not for sentimental reasons, since the family feels no attachment to him. The infant still has no name. Yanfeng betrays hardly a flicker of emotion as she holds her sleeping son, a tiny, breathing bundle swathed in dirty strips of cloth. But then the whole experience, her family says--the trauma of being raped and of having to bear her attacker’s child--has turned a carefree girl into a withdrawn teenager with a vacant stare.

The Guos hope to be vindicated by a second DNA test. If that happens, declared Yanfeng’s father, the baby will have served its purpose. Then they will give the boy away--to anyone who wants to raise him.