Education is necessary 

Sun's ideas on stepping up efforts to teach children how to protect themselves from sexual abuse were echoed by CPPCC members, NPC deputies, children protection experts, lawyers and other children rights campaigners.

Liu Li, a deputy with the National People's Congress, believes family education should play a vital and fundamental role. 

However, for those "left-behind" children in rural areas, living with relatives as their migrant worker parents are earning money in distant cities, school textbooks on how to protect themselves from sexual abuse are also essential.

"The dearth of sex education and everlasting lack of love from within the family pose series of psychological risks for these ‘left behind' children, as they may be misguided by strangers' deceptive intentions, or even too afraid to talk about what they have been through," Liu said, adding that the sexual abuse cases reported are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Last year, the Girls Protection Foundation polled more than 6,000 students from urban and rural areas, and almost half of respondents said they had not received any sex-education program regarding prevention of sexual abuse, suggesting a huge gap in the national curriculum in this particular area.