China's Jaw-Dropping Family Separation Policy

Sigal Samuel - The Atlantic

The government of China has sent approximately one million Uighur Muslims to internment camps for what the government calls “re-education,” according to this article from the Atlantic. "The mass internment system doesn’t only affect the Uighurs incarcerated in it," says the article. "It also involves family separation, which impacts thousands of children." According to the article, when parents are taken away to the internment camps, their children are placed in state-run orphanages where they are "isolated from their relatives [and] cut off from Uighur culture and language."  

The institutions where children are sent, known as “child welfare guidance centers," are reportedly overcrowded and the children are kept in "terrible" conditions, one worker described. Children aged six months to 12 years are “locked up like farm animals in a shed.”