Two Chinese Teachers Sentenced To Die For Sexually Abusing Students

Two Chinese school teachers in just this past week received death sentences for sexual abuse of students — an issue which is seen as a growing and frightening problem in China and has led to a series of protests by middle-class parents in the sprawling country of nearly 1.4 billion people.

On Tuesday, 59-year-old teacher Gao Daosheng was convicted of raping and sexually molesting 11 first grade and second grade students, in the southeastern Chinese city of Wuhu, a bustling city of nearly six million in China’s Anhui Province, on the banks of the Yangtze River.

According to a statement by the Wuhu City Intermediate People’s Court, Gao raped five of the young students multiple times, while sexually abusing six others, starting in late 2011.

His case came one day after another teacher was convicted in the central China city of Nanyang, another heavily populated area with more than 10 million inhabitants.

In the Monday case, Yang Shifu, 56, was convicted of raping two underage girls and sexually abusing several others, though the Nanyang court did not specify how many children were molested by the Chinese teacher in 2012 and 2013 when the incidents took place.

While Yang was also sentenced to die, the court suspended his death sentence by two years, allowing the possibility of commuting the sentence to life in prison, depending on an evaluation of Yang’s behavior in the two year period.

The two cases are the latest in a string of sex abuse cases involving school children and teachers or in some cases, school administrators across the world’s most populous country. In May of 2013, an elementary school principal in Hainan Province was nabbed bringing six young students to a hotel room for purposes of sexually abusing them.

The case touched off a national scandal and one female protester, Ye Haiyan, was photographed carrying a sign that read, “Principal, if you want to get a hotel room, get in touch with me. Leave the kids alone!”

The photo led to a nationwide online meme of people sarcastically offering themselves to school teachers and officials, instead of underage students. But after that May case, eight more school sex abuse cases quickly followed by the end of summer, 2013.

There is little information, however, about the extent of child sex abuse in China. A recent study said that one of every eight cases goes unreported.

China also executes many more convicted criminals than any other country in the world, though that number is also a state secret. Human rights organizations put the execution rate in 2013 at one for every 446,204 Chinese citizens.

If accurate, that would mean that China executed more than 3,300 convicts last year. There were 778 executions among all other countries of the world in 2013.

China’s total will likely rise by two, with this week’s sentences handed down to the two Chinese teachers.