22-year-old Zhao Jingjing sits silently in her bedroom, occaisonally lifting her head to gaze out the window.
"Look at her just sitting there, staring at nothing," her father sighs when reporters visit their home in Hunan's Lini County, Changde. "She watches TV sometimes but won't talk to anyone."
For the past seven years, Jingjing has spent every day of her life doing much the same, trapped in the ten-square-meter that is her room.
In her third year of middle junior school, Jingjing, then a sprightly 15-year-old girl, had a life-altering encounter a mysterious DVD that had been left in the family home. As friends and family gathered around the mahjong table, Jingjing sat alone inside, watching television. Without even meaning to, she turned on the DVD player and the video began playing. After watching for ten minutes, she turned off the television.
"We were having a party that night," her father sheepishly explained to the press. "I don't know who left the disc in our home, but the contents were quite erotic." According to Mr. Zhao, "from that night forward, she came a different person. She wouldn't talk anymore and was always nervous."
One after another, Mr. Zhao began receiving phone calls from Jingjing's teachers and schoolmates, all of them saying that Jingjing wasn't her usual self.
"Back then she was too young, she couldn't accept it" Zhao says, recalling the day he first took his daughter to a psychiatrist. "Those obscene scenes were constantly in her mind, she couldn't get rid of them."
Jingjing was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression, and took a break from school to recover.
Seven years later, she still has not escaped the shadow of those disturbingly erotic scenes. After a few months of treatment she tried to return to her studies but merely fell back into her catatonic state. Because of all the classes she had missed she also felt looked down upon by the other students, and soon dropped out of school entirely.
Jingjing began working but, "because of her character," never lasted very long anywhere. Now, she has resigned herself to complete isolation from the outside world.
"My daughter hates me," Mr. Zhao admits with remorse. "She hates my friend for bring that movie, hates me for making her leave school, for ending up unable to work, for creating the situation we're in today."
Mr. Zhao says that it "makes his heart bleed" to see the state of his daughter every day. Despite finding several doctors, nothing seems to have worked.
According to official statistics, 74 percent of Chinese high school students have never discussed sex with their parents. For those who have received sexual education, only nine percent of students say it came from their parents.
"Watching pornography was the first contact Jingjing ever had with sex," says Xu Min, a psychologist from the Changde Recovery Center. "According to her, sex is something dirty and ugly. Not having received any sexual education, she became haunted by the traumatic experience of viewing the video."
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