A 20-year-old woman in China approached police seeking 'freedom' from her 'control freak' parents, who installed a spy camera in her bedroom. The woman, a second-year university student who goes by the pseudonym 'Li', told Beijing police that her parents would monitor her activities via the spycam, and would hit her and throw her phone on the floor every time she made mistakes.
According to a report by South China Morning Post, details of the case emerged on July 26 when the adult woman went to the Beijing police station for help. She told officers she was running away from her home in another province because she “wanted freedom”.
Li said "violent parenting" has left her suffering from trauma, and to escape her parents, she planned to to find part-time jobs in Beijing to save money and be independent, as per the SCMP report.
The woman told the police that she approached them because she believed her parents would report her missing and “make a scene”, so she wanted to inform them in advance that she was fine.
As per the report, Police officer Zhang Chuanbin comforted her and said her parents' behaviour was the wrong way of expressing their care. He also contacted the woman's parents and asked them to give their adult child more space and show respect.
After police's intervention, the woman's parents have reportedly agreed to take down the camera, and she had returned home.
The parents’ behaviour quickly caught the attention of the Chinese social media users, condemned the parents' behaviour online. “So horrible. Having no private space at all despite being 20,” one person wrote on Weibo, one of the most popular social media platforms in China.
"Children are independent individuals, not parents' belongings - some Chinese parents should keep this in mind," said another.
This is not the first time a story about Chinese parents installing surveillance cameras to control their children has gone viral. In June, a mother in eastern China’s Jiangsu province thanked a surveillance camera for “accompanying" her son for "six years” after he finished the gaokao university entrance exam. After receiving criticism for her actions, the mother argued that the camera installed in her son’s bedroom was “all for his better study performance and improved his grades”.
In another case in 2019, a 14-year-old Jiangsu boy called the police saying his father, who wanted to install a surveillance camera in his room, had “violated his privacy”.