Chapter 1: The Eve of Separation

The Second Intermediate People’s Court of Shanghai made a final judgment on a juvenile criminal case today. The four defendants Gao, Wang, Hu and Liu committed more than 20 robberies in Yangpu District, Zhabei District and Putuo District in the past six months. What is even more outrageous is that several criminals also molested and raped many female victims. The oldest female victim was 45 years old and the youngest was only 16 years old. The average age of the four criminal suspects was less than 19 years old, and the youngest Hu had just turned 16.

Due to the seriousness of the case and the extremely bad social impact, the final judgment is as follows: Gao and Liu, who are both over 18 years old, were sentenced to death in accordance with the law and deprived of political rights for life; Hu and Wang, who were over 16 years old but under 18 years old, were sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve in accordance with the law.

As the recorder of this case, I participated in the trial process of the case throughout. When the death sentence was announced in court, several children cried out of fear, and two of the younger ones wet their pants.

I felt a little sorry, after all, they were in their prime, and their parents had raised them for more than ten years. It was really sad that they would end their short lives before they really became adults, but when I thought about the harm suffered by the victims, I felt that they deserved to die.

During the trial, the judge asked several criminals what their motives were, and the answers of several teenagers were shocking. Several ignorant teenagers in adolescence often gathered together to exchange “experiences” after watching some obscene audio-visual products, and eventually formed this criminal gang.

Their initial criminal plan was just to molest single women walking alone at night, but the first victim they met neither resisted nor shouted for help, which made them more and more courageous. They even forcibly dragged the victim to a secluded place and raped her, regardless of the fact that there were still many pedestrians on the road at that time. After the first time, it developed to the second and third time. Gradually, they even robbed the victim’s property after the gang rape, which led them to this road of no return.

I was taking notes quickly. I have worked as a full-time court clerk for more than 10 years and have come into contact with many cases of all kinds, but this case caused a lot of waves in my heart. The family conditions of these children are not bad, but their parents lack discipline and even indulge their behavior, which has caused such a big mistake, harming others and themselves. If their parents can correctly teach them the knowledge of sex, this kind of thing will definitely not happen.

I was doing my work while thinking about it. Years of work have trained me to have the bad habit of distraction. With the final death sentence, the case came to an end. Several criminals were escorted back to the detention center by the bailiffs to wait for execution, and my day’s work was over.

I was tidying up the messy documents on the desk, and Judge Liu Lingling chatted with me casually: “Sister Zhang, why are all these kids like this now? How old are they? They dare to commit such a big crime for that matter! How did their parents discipline them?” I didn’t even raise my head and said while busy with the work in my hands: “It’s because the parents didn’t discipline them that this happened. Nowadays, parents only know how to make money, and think that they are responsible for their children as long as their children have enough money to spend. In fact, educating children is not that simple. Forget it, you won’t understand even if I tell you. How can you, a grown-up girl, know the hardship of raising a child!” Liu Lingling is a college student who just graduated and was assigned to work. She is still in the stage of dating her boyfriend. She really has nothing to say about the discussion of children’s education. When she heard it, her face blushed and she quickly turned the topic to a Korean TV series last night. I returned to the office and checked the time. There was still half an hour before the end of get off work. During this time, I had nothing to do, so I had to play the boring minesweeper game on the computer. The company’s computers are not allowed to install other games. When we are bored, we can only play Minesweeper and Solitaire, which are the games that come with the system, to kill time.

Although I know that playing such games is extremely stupid, there is no way that the government department has this system. You are not allowed to leave early before the end of the work time. Even if you sleep, read newspapers, or play stupid games, you have to stay here honestly.

Finally, I finished a day’s work and had to prepare dinner when I got home. My husband and son didn’t come back. I made a few dishes casually and cooked a pot of rice in the rice cooker, just waiting for them to come home to have dinner together.

Today is the weekend. My husband has an important lecture. My son is about to enter the third year of high school and will take the college entrance examination. The school arranges evening self-study until very late every weekend. So even though it is close to 7 o’clock in the evening, I don’t feel strange that the father and son haven’t come back yet. I just feel bored with nothing to do.

I went back to the bedroom and turned on the computer to check the news online, but the computer was very slow to enter the system. After finally entering the system, the mouse was completely out of control. I remembered that my husband had said before going to work in the morning that he had been infected with a virus when he was using the computer to search for information online last night. There was no anti-virus software at home, so I waited for him to buy an anti-virus disk to come back and fix it in the evening.

I had to turn off the power of the host. Fortunately, there was another computer in my son’s room. I walked to my son’s computer and turned on the host to enter the desktop smoothly. There were only QQ, IE browser, and shortcuts to two or three games on the desktop of my son’s computer. The background was a picture of Yao Ming shooting a basketball. Compared with the messy desktop full of shortcuts on the computer shared by my husband and me, it looked much cleaner and neater.

I opened the IE browser and wanted to go to Sina to check the news, but as soon as I typed an S in the address bar, a series of addresses that had been visited in the drop-down menu made my heart sink suddenly. This is an adult website starting with sex. From the browsing history that I kept, my son has been on this website for more than one or two days. Looking at the obscene pictures on the screen, I felt dizzy.

I hurriedly opened my computer and checked the hard disk partitions one by one. On the surface, I didn’t see any suspicious pictures and videos. I was still worried, so I ran a search for the keyword JPG to see if there were any hidden pictures. It didn’t matter. Tens of thousands of pictures were hidden in a folder called “Review Questions” under the D drive. I opened the so-called “Review Questions” folder and found that it was classified into several folders according to the videos and pictures, with a total storage capacity of 30G. I opened them one by one. Not only were there tens of thousands of pornographic pictures, but there were also dozens of adult movies commonly known as “pornographic films”. I casually looked at the contents of a few of them. Most of them were shot by Japanese people. There was no plot. They just tried their best to show the whole process of sexual intercourse. The pictures were similar to the movies. They were all beauties from various countries with different skin colors showing women’s private parts and naked sexual intercourse pictures. I sat slumped in front of the computer. I couldn’t tell what I felt in my heart. I hated and annoyed my son, but more of it was disappointment. At this time, I wanted to pick up a chair and smash his computer. Why was this unlucky child so disappointing? But after calming down for a while, I felt very scared again. The crying scenes of several children sentenced to death in the court during the day filled my mind. No! I must not let my child follow their footsteps. I tried my best to control my emotions and analyze how to educate my son. Years of experience in handling cases have made me know that adolescent children have a strong rebellious psychology. Many cases I have handled were caused by the incorrect education methods of underage parents, which led the children from rebellion to the road of crime.

I turned off the computer to prevent the child from being nervous when he came back to see that I had used his computer. After thinking for a long time, I felt that it would be better to discuss this matter with my husband. After all, my husband is an expert in psychology and he and my son are both men. It is easier for him to communicate about “sex” issues than for me as a mother.

My husband came back first while I was anxiously waiting. Before I told him about my son’s addiction to pornographic websites, he excitedly told me a good news: the copyright of one of his books was bought by an authoritative American organization, and he was invited to the United States to give a three-month academic lecture for several well-known psychological medical schools. He will fly directly to New York tomorrow.

This is indeed good news. I am happy that my husband’s achievements have been recognized, but when I think of my son’s problem, I turn from joy to sorrow. I told my husband everything that happened in my son’s computer and asked him to give me some advice.

My husband just smiled and comforted me, saying, “This is normal. It’s understandable that adolescents are eager to know the opposite sex and are curious about sex. Find time to talk to him. As long as he has self-control, it won’t have much negative impact on him.”

I objected, “The key is how can we be sure that children have self-control? The children in the gang rape and robbery case I participated in today were all his age. Nowadays, children of this age are spoiled. How strong is their self-control? If we let him develop like this, he will become a psychopath at the least, and he may even commit a crime at the worst!”

My husband also felt that what I said was wrong. It makes sense, but in the face of huge honor and fame, he had no time to care about it, so he had to say to me: “I don’t have the time and energy to deal with such trivial matters now. Let me give you a business card. This is my graduate school classmate, who is also a psychology expert. If the child has no abnormalities in the past few months, wait for me to come back and I will give him psychological counseling. If you think there is anything wrong with him recently, you can contact this doctor Zheng, she will help you and the child.” “But in my opinion, there is no need to make such a fuss. Don’t you still have confidence in our child?” I put away the business card and said to my husband: “You! The older you get, the more you care about fame and fortune. I am not for our child. I don’t have confidence, but the society is too complicated now. Children can easily get access to so much bad information. I care about him for the purpose of preventing it from happening. Okay, let’s not talk about this. If there is any problem, I will find Dr. Zheng as you said. You can go to the United States without worry. I will prepare your luggage for you after dinner.”