A 16-year-old girl in China killed her mother in retaliation for being sent to a treatment center for Internet addiction where she was abused, The Washington Post reports. The girl tied her mother to a chair for a week, starving her to death.
On a previous occasion, according to the Post, she stabbed her father with a knife, causing him to be hospitalized.
The girl had been forcibly taken to the internet addiction treatment center on the suggestion of an aunt, and claimed that she was essentially tortured there. This fits the stories of other former treatment center students, who report being beaten and forced into tasks like cleaning toilets with their bare hands. She eventually escaped the camp after four months there.
“I am angry. People point at my nose and call me unfilial and worse than a beast,” she wrote, according to the Post. “It was them who sent me there. It was them who cursed me and beat me, it was them who sabotaged my life and libeled my character; but it was also them who said they loved me. My friends here, if it were you, what would you do?”
She also threatened her parents within that same post, saying she wanted to learn martial arts in order to hurt them. She made good on the threat, tying her mother to a chair and sending photos and videos to her aunt with a ransom demand. Even though her aunt sent the money and the girl called an ambulance, it was too late to save the girl’s mother.
After the Chinese newspaper Thepaper.cn reported the girl’s story, other students from the treatment center shared their own experiences of being mistreated while at the camp. Multiple teens have died while in “treatment” at similar centers, and officials are investigating the reports about this particular camp. Physical punishment at these treatment centers is against the law.