mother of eight children
Chained woman video outrages China
02/01/2022, 12:08 p.m
A clip that was uploaded to a Chinese video platform caused horror in the country: There you can see a woman chained at the neck and living in a run-down shed. According to local media, the mother of eight children is suffering from schizophrenia.
A video showing a chained woman in a run-down mud hut has caused great horror in China: the authorities have now initiated investigations into the woman’s husband. There is an investigation, several media quoted from an official statement on Sunday. The woman herself is said to be in hospital for treatment.
The approximately two-minute recording was uploaded by a blogger on January 26 to the video platform Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. It shows a woman chained around her neck. Despite temperatures around freezing, she only wears light clothing. In total, the video and corresponding hashtags were clicked over 200 million times.
According to local media, the authorities made an initial statement on the background of the case on Friday. According to this, the woman, who lives in the eastern Chinese city of Xuzhou, has been married since 1998 and is the mother of eight children. She suffers from severe schizophrenia, which has repeatedly led to outbreaks of violence in the past.
A heated debate then developed on China’s social media. This was mainly directed against the initial reaction of the authorities, who initially did not address the terrible treatment of the victim in their statement. “Are you treating the woman like a human being at all?” is one of the most clicked comments. Users also debated the lack of awareness of mental illness in China’s rural provinces.