JINHA

NEWS CENTER - According to state numbers, 2,553 children were slain and 9,090 went missing in Russia in the previous year. Russian Children's Rights Commissioner Pavel Astakhov has admitted that even for a large country like Russia, the number is extremely high.

There has been an increase in murders of children in Russia, where approximately 100,000 children are victims of crimes every year. The State Duma Committee on Public Health, in its 2012 report, showed that around 40% of all violent crimes in Russia were committed within families.

Pavel Astakhov has recently been in the news for his public statements downplaying a prominent child marriage case, in which a 17-year-old Chechen girl was married to a police official at least 30 years her senior. When journalists raised alarms about the girl and her family being aggressively pressured to accept the marriage, the Children's Rights Commissioner provoked social media criticism from Russian women with his sexist and racist remarks that Chechen women were "mature at a young age."

(zd/cm)