Hebei Police Rape Female Falun Gong Practitioners

7/14/01 (Falun Dafa Information Center) According to news sources in Hebei Province, police in Xingtai Public Security Bureau have gang-raped many female Falun Gong practitioners. One policeman boasted to others that he had raped three Falun Gong practitioners.

According to the sources, the Xingtai Public Security Bureau and Xingtai Qiaodong District Public Security Branch Office jointly established an “anti-Falun Gong special task force” to arrest and torture a large number of Falun Gong practitioners. Police stripped female practitioners down to nothing and used bamboo sticks to beat them and electric batons to shock their breasts and vaginas.

Sources revealed that many female practitioners’ hands and feet were cuffed and that they were raped by police in the vehicles while being escorted to the detention centers. Afterwards, a local policeman even boasted about such an action during his casual conversation.

A reporter telephoned Zheng Shaoqin, member of the “special task force,” to ask about this issue. When asked, Zheng did not deny anything, but instead quickly hung up the phone.

Various materials indicate that the sexual abuse against Falun Gong practitioners by police is government-sanctioned. Officials in Masanjia labor camp in Shengyang stripped naked 18 female Falun Gong practitioners and threw them in male prison cells. The director of Beijing Qianmen Police Station openly raped female practitioners. Another female practitioner was brutally beaten and raped by a plainclothes policeman in Beijing this May.

In China, lawyers are not allowed to defend Falun Gong practitioners. Human rights observers attribute such sexual abuse cases not only to low morality of individual officials, but also to systemic government-sanctioned violence and hatred. According to the internal sources from China’s public security system, the “610 Office” (a government department established specifically to detain and persecute Falun Gong practitioners) had issued unwritten –policies, such as “Defame Falun Gong practitioners’ social reputations, cut off their financial income, and eliminate them physically” and “[Those] beating [Falun Gong practitioners] to death will not bear legal responsibility and the case should be reported as suicide.” Many local police officers openly claim that “the policy from the leadership allows us to go beyond legal constraints against Falun Gong” and “No measure is excessive when dealing with Falun Gong; beating to death will be counted as suicide.”