How to Help a Rescued Abused Child: Lessons from Rural Yunnan
I sat on a splintered pine bench at a small child care center outside Kunming last spring, watching 7-year-old Xiao Mei flinch after knocking over a bowl of hot rice. She’d crept out of her hiding spot behind the curtain to get a second serving, and when I moved to help her wipe up the spill, she pulled back so fast she hit her temple on the edge of the table. She didn’t cry. She just hunched her shoulders and stared at the floor, waiting.
Xiao Mei had been rescued three weeks earlier from a village in the mountainous part of Yunnan. Her parents had left to find work in the city years before and never came back; her grandmother, who’d cared for her, died suddenly. For two years, distant relatives locked her in a small storage shed behind their house most days, only letting her out to feed their pigs. A visiting village teacher noticed her through a crack in the door and reported it to child protection workers. I was there as a volunteer teacher, helping the center run their small on-site school for kids who weren’t ready for regular public school yet.
The center held 12 kids, most removed from dangerous homes. The walls were painted a faded sky blue, and dandelions grew through a crack in the concrete play yard. For the first two weeks, Xiao Mei didn’t speak a single word. She only ate when no one was looking, and she hid dried crackers and hard candies in the seam of her pillowcase. When an 8-year-old boy reached into her pillow to grab a stolen cracker one afternoon, she bit him hard on the forearm, leaving a dark purple bruise. The other on-site workers reached for her to pull her away, ready to scold her for hurting another kid. I stepped between them.
I sat down on the floor so I was level with where she was crouched, and held my hands up, palms out, so she could see I wasn’t holding anything. I said, “That was your cracker. It’s okay to be mad someone took your thing. I’d be mad too.” I didn’t yell. I didn’t force her to apologize right away. I walked the other boy to the kitchen, got him a band-aid and a frozen popsicle, and explained that Xiao Mei hadn’t had anyone make sure her things stayed hers for a long time.
That’s the thing most people get wrong about rescuing an abused child. Everyone celebrates when the kid is pulled out of the dangerous home, but that’s just the first step. All the work happens after, in the small messy daily moments. Most of the time, when these kids act out, it’s not because they’re bad or ungrateful. It’s because their whole lives up to that point have taught them that the only way to keep themselves safe is to fight first, ask questions never.
I picked up a few small habits that worked, things any parent or teacher can do without special training. I never moved closer to her or touched her without saying what I was going to do first. If I needed to brush a leaf out of her hair, I’d say, “I’m going to touch your head to get that leaf out, okay? I won’t hurt you.” If she didn’t nod, I’d step back. I never asked her about the shed, or the relatives, or any of the bad things that happened. A lot of people told me I should get her to talk about it, but pressing her just made her hide for the rest of the day. Instead, I just talked about small, unimportant things when I sat near her: “That butterfly over there is the same yellow as your hair tie” or “The rice today has extra corn, did you notice?”
Once, a big thunderstorm knocked out the power around dinner time. All the other kids crowded around the candle and laughed about silly stories, but Xiao Mei crawled into the supply closet down the hall and pulled the door closed. One of the new workers wanted to open the door and pull her out, tell her there was nothing to be scared of. I stopped her. I grabbed a small bag of dried mango, which Xiao Mei liked more than any other snack, and sat down on the floor outside the closet. I said, “I brought your mango. I’m sitting right here if you want it. You can keep the door closed if you want.” Then I ate my own mango and didn’t say anything else. Twenty minutes later, the door creaked open an inch, and she crawled out and sat down next to me. I didn’t pull her close or anything. I just gave her the mango and let her lean against my leg if she wanted.
These small things don’t sound like much, but they add up. A lot of people want to rush the process, fix the kid, make everything okay right away. They want to hug away the bad memories, make them talk about their feelings, get them back to normal as fast as possible. But that just makes most abused kids shut down even more. If you’re a teacher with a kid who flinches when you reach across their desk, or a new caregiver to a hurt kid, you don’t have to do big things. Just announce your movements before you make them. Just name their feeling before you correct their behavior. Just let them stay hidden if they need to, and wait for them to come out on their own.
I left the center after three months, when my volunteer time was up. A month after I left, a couple that runs a small bookstore in Kunming, who have years of experience caring for hurt kids, took Xiao Mei in as their long-term care kid. The last update I got was that she’s started talking more now. She likes to pick wildflowers on the hill behind their house and press them in the pages of old story books. She still hides in the back closet when thunderstorms come, and the couple just sits outside with her snacks, waiting. She still keeps a cracker under her pillow every night, just in case. No one knows how long it will take her to feel safe all the time. Rescue isn’t a single big moment where everything gets fixed. It’s just a thousand small, quiet choices, every day, to show a kid that the world doesn’t have to hurt them anymore.
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