Authorities in Shanghai have temporarily closed a local day-care center and detained three staff members amid allegations of child abuse. The facility, affiliated with China's largest online travel agency C-trip, cared for some 110 children with ages from 18 months to 3 years old. Footage of the alleged abuse, released to the public online, have caused a national uproar. Wu Haojun has the story.

 

This is the footage that has enraged the nation. In one, the rough handling of a child barely two years old. In another, a female caretaker, now under the custody of Shanghai police, feeds the toddlers what's later revealed to be wasabi. You can't tell from their blurred faces, but they started crying and gasping for air. The backlash was immediate and emotional.

 

"I watched two and a half hours of footage. And I just couldn't continue. You fed my daughter half a bowl of wasabi in just half an hour. She had to defecate six times in an hour!"

 

The kneeling perpetrator did not win any sympathy with the Chinese public. Videos of the abuse have been viewed tens of millions of times since they were made public. "I usually look through Weibo before sleeping, but after seeing this, I can no longer sleep," one person wrote. "This makes me worry for the safety of my own daughter at school," another commented. What's particularly unsettling, people say, is that the abuse happened in the place you'd least expect at a daycare center set up by C-trip, China's largest online travel agency, for the children of its own employees. And it's run by a third-party agency that's owned by a family-oriented magazine under the aegis of the Shanghai Women's Federation.

 

SHI QI VICE PRESIDENT OF C-TRIP "We didn't do our due diligence. We didn't supervise the operations well."

 

ZHANG BAOBAO MANAGER OF DAYCARE CENTER "We already called the police and will enforce stricter management in the future. This is an isolated incident on the part of the perpetrator."

 

But on a national scale, this is far from an isolated incident. Stories of abuse of very young children frequently surface. What went wrong and what should be done. The incident, if anything, has re-ignited a discussion about how to better protect the most innocent and vulnerable. WHJ, CGTN.