Prosecutors Take Up a 13-Year-Old's Rape Case — and Charge Her Teenage Friend as an Accomplice

The case of a 13-year-old girl in Yuncheng, in China's northern province of Shanxi, who reported being raped only to have local police decline to open a file has taken its decisive turn. On September 22 her brother told China News Weekly that the suspect's case has been transferred to prosecutors, who describe the evidence as "clear and conclusive" — and that the girl's 17-year-old friend has been moved forward for prosecution as a co-offender in the same assault.

According to the girl's account, the events began on the night of April 18. She had been staying at the rented flat of a friend she considered a "good older sister" after falling out with her own family. That evening she went to a bar, and when it closed a 30-year-old man known as "Hei Ge" offered to see her home. Wary, she asked the friend and her boyfriend to walk along. Back at the flat the group split up; the man returned, offered her 888 yuan for sex and, when she protested that the flat had security cameras, telephoned the friend to confirm there were none. He then raped her. Some 500 yuan reached the girl days later, passed on through the same friend.

What turned a criminal case into a national flashpoint was the response to it. The family reported the assault on April 30; on June 12 the district police branch decided not to file charges, with officers citing "insufficient evidence" and telling relatives the girl had been "voluntary" — a claim with no legal meaning, since the age of consent in China is fourteen and hospital records put the girl at thirteen years and three months. The same threshold drove a case that stirred a parallel debate last week, in which a court upheld the rape conviction of a 16-year-old boy for a relationship with his 14-year-old girlfriend. Meanwhile, the family says, the Yuncheng suspect came to the girl's home and warned that he would kill her family if she did not withdraw her report.

After the case spread widely in June, police reversed themselves within days, opened a formal investigation and detained the man. The development that carried the story back to the top of Weibo's searches this week is the friend: police have designated her a co-offender and moved her case to prosecutors as well. Her part in the record is specific — she gave the man the room number, confirmed there were no cameras, and relayed the 500 yuan. "My sister had always thought of her as a good older sister," the girl's brother told the magazine. The friend's own explanation, as the girl recalls it, was that the man was her "recognized big brother" and that she "didn't dare deceive him." Online, the charge has divided opinion — between readers who argue that being a minor is not a licence to enable a crime, and those who see a 17-year-old caught up in an adult's scheme.

The evidence file the family has shared includes the record of what the suspect was doing while the police claim sat unfiled. In messages dated May 10, weeks after the report had been made, he instructed the friend to erase their correspondence: delete the history, keep a screen recording, send it to him — "because this between us absolutely must not be seen by your mom."

There is a second thread still open. The girl's brother reported the officers who first refused the case to the discipline hotline, and on September 8, he says, the municipal inspectorate told him a formal discipline case into the no-file decision had been opened. No officer has been named. How a court weighs a 17-year-old's part beside the man who abused her friend, and whether anyone in uniform answers for the months the file sat shut, is what the case now turns on.