This photo has circulated since 2018 in reports about a child allegedly abused by his mother in China’s Dongguan city

This article is more than one year old.
Published on May 4, 2020 at 11:30
3 min read
By AFP Hong Kong

An image of a child with a bruised face has been shared hundreds of times on Facebook alongside a claim he was beaten by his father, a serving police officer in Hong Kong. The posts were shared after a video circulated in media reports in late April 2020 purporting to show a Hong Kong police officer abusing a child. The claim in the Facebook posts is false; the photo of the injured child has circulated since 2018 in media reports about an unrelated child abuse case in China’s Guangdong province.

The image was published here on Facebook on April 29, 2020. It has been shared more than 900 times.

The image is a collage of two photos that show close-ups of a child’s face, black with bruises.

The post’s traditional Chinese-language caption translates to English as: “A rogue police officer beat his own son.”

Two Chinese characters, 黑警 ("hak ging"), in the caption can be translated to English as "rogue". They have been chanted by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong to denote police officers they deem to be corrupt, as reported here by AFP.

Below is a screenshot of the misleading post:

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Screenshot of the misleading post

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The post was published shortly after this video was shared online which purported to show a Hong Kong police officer abusing his son in late April 2020. A police officer was subsequently arrested and suspended from duty over the alleged incident, according to reports by Hong Kong-based newspapers South China Morning Post and The Standard.

The image was also shared here on Facebook alongside a similar claim.

The claim is false; the photo has circulated in reports since at least June 2018, almost two years before the alleged child abuse incident in Hong Kong that was reported by local media in April 2020.

A reverse image search of one of the photos in the image combined with a keyword search found this Weibo post published on the official account of the Chinese newspaper Guangzhou Daily on June 7, 2018.

Part of the video’s caption translates to English as: “[#4YearOldBoyBeatenUpByBiologicalMother# Genitals swollen resulting in urination incontinence] On June 5 in a residential area in Dongguan, Guangdong. A four-year-old boy was found beaten by his mother. His head, face and genitals were swollen. At that time, the neighbour who called the police at the first place said with lingering fear that when he/she saw the boy's bruised and swollen face in the corridor, he/she thought he/she saw a ghost and was badly scared. And he/ she can't imagine the injury is caused by his own mother, for it's too cruel! For the intervention of the neighborhood, Xue, the boy's mother, was still angry: ‘I nearly died in childbirth when I gave birth to him. If I knew he would not be obedient, so I might have strangled him at that time. He has to get beaten if acting not obedient.’

“It is reported that Xue, aged 27, divorced his husband half a year ago and would beat her son to vent as long as she was in a bad mood. At present, Xue was detained by the local police on suspicion of maltreatment, and the boy has been temporarily placed in the care of his grandmother.”

Dongguan is a city in southeast China’s Guangdong province.

The Weibo post was published alongside a video, which shows the same image as that in the misleading post, for the first nine seconds.

Below is a screenshot of the Guangzhou Daily video:

Screenshot of the Guangzhou Daily video

The child abuse case was also reported by other local Chinese media in 2018, including the news website The Paper here, the Nanfang Metropolis Daily newspaper here, and the Dongguan Times newspaper here.

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