How To Support A Rescued Abused Child: Lessons From Rural Yunnan
The mist sticks to the cypress hills outside our small group home in Pu’er, Yunnan, even at midday in mid-October. I was folding donated sweaters that day, most of them dotted with little cartoon rabbits, when seven-year-old Xiao Mei slipped into the room. She’d been with us three weeks, rescued from her maternal grandfather who’d been left to care for her while her parents worked factory jobs in Guangzhou and never sent money home. She stopped a foot from the folding table, and I looked up to see her staring at my old hiking belt, draped over the edge of the table next to the stack of sweaters. In two seconds, she’d dropped to her knees, pulled her arms over the back of her head, and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t make a sound.
I’d sat through a two-day trauma training before I started volunteering here, but nothing had prepared me for that moment. My first instinct was to rush over, pull her up, and tell her everything was fine, that I’d never hurt her. But I remembered one small thing the trainer said: when a kid is stuck in fear, don’t add more movement or noise. I just leaned over, slow, hooked the belt with my finger, and dropped it into the closed drawer of the table. I sat back down on my wooden stool, and went back to folding sweaters, quiet, no talking. It was almost five minutes before she peeked out from under her arms. Another minute later, she crawled over and sat on the floor next to my feet, still quiet. That was the first small connection we had.
For the first two months, most of the other caregivers thought Xiao Mei was just stubborn and badly behaved. She’d bite any kid that got within a foot of her cot. She stole extra hard candies from the snack jar every afternoon, and we found dozens of rotting candies tucked under the straw of her mattress when we changed the sheets. She wouldn’t eat dinner if more than three people were sitting at the table, and she never spoke above a whisper. One afternoon, after she bit Da Wei, our oldest kid, hard enough to break skin, one of the older caregivers said we needed to put her in time out for an hour and make her apologize properly, that we were spoiling her by letting her get away with everything.
I pushed back, not because I’m an expert, but because I’d already seen what punishment did. When we first got her, I raised my voice a little to stop her from running into the road, and she locked herself in the outhouse for three hours. That’s when I started testing small, simple changes that any caregiver can do, no fancy degree required. The first thing I did was adjust our environment to cut out common triggers, before they became problems. We’d all gotten used to keeping old leather belts handy to tap kids’ hands when they misbehaved, a habit most of us grew up with here. After the belt incident, we put all the belts away in closed closets, swapped them for plastic rulers if we needed to point something out to a kid. I also started making a point to keep my voice lower when I call across the yard or the hills, even when I’m worried a kid is wandering too far. It takes almost no effort, but it cuts out so many unnecessary fear responses.
The second thing I learned is to never force vulnerability or affection. A lot of volunteers who come through want to hug the kids, or ask them to talk about what happened to them, because they think that’s how you heal. We never asked Xiao Mei about her grandfather, not once. We just said once, early on, that if she ever wants to talk about anything that scares her, we’ll listen. If she doesn’t want to hug me goodbye at the end of the day, that’s fine—she can wave, or just run off to play, no pressure. When she bit Da Wei, I didn’t make her get down on her knees and apologize like our old caregiver wanted. I cleaned Da Wei’s scratch, gave him an extra lollipop for the pain, and turned to Xiao Mei and said, “Biting hurts people. Next time you don’t want someone near you, you can say ‘go away’ loud, or you can come find me. I’ll help.” That was it. No yelling, no time out. Within a week, she’d stopped biting, mostly. If she’s scared, she just says “go away” now, quiet but clear.
Third, I learned to reframe unwanted behavior as just safety behavior. When we found all those candies under her mattress, I didn’t make her throw them away or scold her for stealing. She’d gone years without enough to eat, never knowing when her next meal would come, so hoarding food wasn’t being greedy—it was keeping herself safe. Instead of punishing her, I sewed a small cloth pouch out of an old donated t-shirt, left it on her pillow after breakfast, and told her “This is your bag. Anything you put in here is yours, no one will touch it or take it away, unless you say we can.” It’s been five months now, and she still keeps a few candies in that pouch, but she doesn’t hide rotting ones under her mattress anymore. She knows she can have a candy any time she wants, and she gets to keep what’s hers.
Last week, we all went up the hill behind the home to pick wild mushrooms for dinner. Xiao Mei wandered off further than usual, and I called her name, a little louder than I meant to, because the sun was going down. I saw her freeze mid-step, just like she did that day with the belt, shoulders hunch up like she was waiting for something bad. But two seconds later, she turned around, and walked back to me, slow, not running away. She just held up the little yellow wild flower she’d picked, and handed it to me.
She starts at the local primary school next week. She still flinches sometimes when someone moves their hand too fast near her head. We still don’t know if her parents will ever come get her, or if we’ll find a foster family that’s patient enough for her. It’s not a perfect story, and it doesn’t have a neat ending yet. But that’s the thing no one tells you about supporting these kids: you don’t have to fix them. You just have to put the belt away, sew the pouch, keep your voice down, and wait. That’s enough, most days.
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