Slow recovery

Working with volunteers guided by trained psychiatric and counselling professionals from China and abroad, Xi's team locates brothels and works to establish positive relationships with workers in the hopes of later helping them escape. Xi said the process is slow, but effective.

Police raids and crackdowns on prostitution have become more frequent this year.

Volunteers spend time bonding with the girls, throwing them birthday parties, taking them for medical check-up and sometimes simply offering a shoulder to cry on. Eventually enough trust is built up for them to leave their lives of prostitution and move into a care facility where they work to heal from their abuses and eventually reintegrate into society.

Cai Feng, a "madame" of a local brothel regularly visited by the group, said she has willingly assisted the volunteers in helping one of her girls leave her brothel. "The girl cried every night since the day she arrived," Feng said. "I knew she would not survive in this industry, so I am happy that there are people able to take her away and help her."

Housing approximately 15 women at a time, the facility provides a safe place to live, literacy classes, counselling sessions, vocational training and eventual employment through a local business with proper healthcare coverage.

Sexual ignorance

The team also offers sex education classes to women still working in prostitution. Xi noted how astonished the educators were by the naivety and innocence of women so otherwise well-versed in sexual activities.

"Some girls don't even know how babies were born," said one teacher. "There have been girls in the classes who literally had no idea what part of the body babies came out of." There are a surprisingly large number of basic facts and life skills such as this that these girls have never learned. After lives spent in abuse, activities as simple as socializing and bonding with others are often entirely foreign concepts.

Wu Ling, a young girl staying at the center said that the facility has provided her with the only healthy sense of love and family that she has ever known. As the seventh girl in her family, she was made to understand that she was never wanted. "My family called me 'ugly one,'" Wu recounted with little emotion. "When I was a girl they put me in a cardboard box in the pigpen and told me they did not want me."