“A 14-year old Chinese boy killed himself after running up a bill of 1,800 yuan ($230) calling phone sex numbers, the official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday. Li Hongbin, from a village in poor northwestern Gansu province, dropped out of school last year and began calling the expensive hotlines in August. He committed suicide by drinking pesticide after a telephone company clerk called at the family home asking for payment. The longest conversation listed in a 16-page phone bill went on for over four hours, Xinhua said. Calls cost three yuan a minute, Xinhua cited the head of one service as saying. The average monthly cash income of Chinese farmers is just 300 yuan. Phone sex services have been proliferating in recent years, with adverts in local telephone directories and newspapers, but Beijing is also attempting to crack down on pornography with a campaign that includes monitoring phone sex lines.” — Hindustan Times (India)

It is quite probable that this poor boy’s suicide was conditioned by behavioral codes unique to the time and place — a particularly Chinese sense of honor, a shame that sexual secrets were exposed, a desperation that comes from dire poverty. But all the same, what this incident amounts to is a horny teenage boy killing himself because his natural desires caused him to blow a few weeks’ wages. For an American, that’s like setting the value of a human life at the cost of an iPhone.

In spite of the fact that prostitution is thriving, China has been trying to crack down on sex-related businesses, particularly anything conjoining pornography and technology. No doubt Communist authorities will use a suicide such as this to say, “See? Phone sex leads to death!” It’s too bad, because these sorts of businesses will exist so long as anyone has lust and a dollar — which is to say that they’ll always exist. If authorities really want to prevent needless deaths such as this, they would do better to apply their Communist precepts to the business itself. Rather than hound the poor girls who staff the phones, find some way to spread around their cost. If that poor boy had enjoyed cheap or even free access to PSOs, he’d still be alive today.

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