>>9674654Lu Yi (August 1991)
Lu Yi, a mildly retarded fourteen-year-old boy, was tortured by an orphanage child-care worker in an incident witnessed and ignored by a senior staff member. He was later transferred to a mental hospital without medical justification, in an apparent attempt to conceal the abuse.
On August 25, 1991, a child-care worker asked Lu Yi to steal soap for her from a communal washroom. When this was discovered, another child-care worker, Li Laidi, tied Lu Yi up in a standing position and then stabbed his genitals repeatedly with a yacha (a metal fork attached to a bamboo pole, used to hang and remove clothes hangers from a clothesline or drying rack). Li Laidi also ordered other children to pull out Lu Yi's pubic hair, and forced him to jump up and down while tied, causing him to fall over several times.
Vice-director Zhen Weiming came across this incident accidentally while passing by the room where the abuse was taking place. However, he reportedly laughed and passed by, commenting that the children were playing a "game."
The following January, Lu Yi was transferred to the Shanghai No.1 Social Psychiatric Rehabilitation Institute, a mental hospital administered by the municipal Civil Affairs Bureau, despite the fact that he showed no signs of mental illness. His present whereabouts are unknown.[286]
Li Laidi has since retired. She was not subject to any disciplinary action for her abuse of Lu Yi.
In addition to these and other cases, in which children suffered violent physical abuse on the orphanage grounds, Human Rights Watch/Asia has also documented several incidents in which children were forcibly removed from the orphanage and physically abused while being held illegally at other locations (see below, "Illegal Detention
