’Chinese kidnappers swoop on girls amid shortage of females’

China’s one-child policy has led to a shortage of females that baby kidnappers are ruthlessly exploiting, forcing authorities to launch a nation-wide DNA database to help resolve identification of missing children, a news report said.

China’s one-child policy has led to a shortage of females that baby kidnappers are ruthlessly exploiting, forcing authorities to launch a nation-wide DNA database to help resolve identification of missing children, a news report said on Sunday.

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Thousands of parents across China have been forced to resort to a mass campaign by signing up to a website whose name means “baby come home”. They have posted details of their missing children on the social website, defying authorities instinctive move to suppress such a campaign.

According to China’s public security ministry, between 2,000 and 3,000 children and young women are kidnapped every year, but the state-controlled newspapers have put the figure as high as 20,000, The Times daily reported.

The ministry was forced to launch a nation-wide DNA database to help resolve identification of missing children.

China imposed the one-child policy in 1979 to curb population growth that had rocketed out of control since Mao Zedong’s instruction to the nation in the 1960s to bury the United States in a human wave.

With the strict birth control policy, a recent report in the British Medical Journal showed that 124 boys are born for every 100 girls in the country as a whole, and in one province the figure has risen to 192.

Moreover, widespread use of abortions of girls in families intent on having a boy, has left the countryside short of female babies.