Lan remembers the night that changed her whole life.
While
preparing for university along the border in northern Vietnam, a friend
she met online asked her to a group dinner. When she was tired and
wanted to go home, the people asked her to stay and talk and have a
drink.
Next thing she knew, she had been smuggled across the border to China.
"At that time, I wanted to leave," says Lan. "There were other girls there in the car but there was people to guard us."
The
villages along the Vietnamese-Chinese border are a hunting ground for
human traffickers. Girls as young as 13 say they are tricked or drugged,
then spirited across the porous border by boat, motorbike or car. Young
Vietnamese women are valuable commodities in China, where the one-child
policy and long-standing preference for sons has heavily skewed the
gender ratio.
To put it simply, Chinese men are hungry for brides
"It costs a very huge amount of money
for normal Chinese man to get married to a Chinese woman," explained Ha
Thi Van Khanh, national project coordinator for the U.N.'s
anti-trafficking organization in Vietnam. Traditionally, Chinese men
wishing to marry local women are expected to pay for an elaborate
banquet and to have purchased a new home to live in after the wedding.
"This is why they try to import women from neighboring countries,
including Vietnam."
Diep Vuong
started the Pacific Links Foundation to combat trafficking in Vietnam.
She says that Vietnamese brides can sell for upwards of $3,000 to the
end buyer and that they are often considered desirable because of
cultural similarities to the Chinese.
Nguyen
was just 16 when a friend's boyfriend drugged her and smuggled her into
China. She tried to resist a forced marriage. For three months, she
refused, even though her traffickers beat her, withheld food and
threatened to kill her, she says. Finally, she relented. She says her
husband was kind to her, but she never stopped missing her family in
Vietnam.
"My desire to go home
was indescribable," Nguyen said. "I agreed to marry the man but I could
not stay with a stranger without any feelings for him."
When
her mother-in-law realized Lan was never going to warm to the marriage,
the family returned her to the traffickers. They got their money back,
Nguyen says, after which she was forced into a second marriage.
A refuge for escaped women
The
Pacific Links Foundation runs a shelter for trafficking victims in the
city of Lao Cai, northern Vietnam. The young women stay for an average
of two to three years. They go to school or get vocational training.
They do art therapy. They learn to cook and sew and keep a big garden.
Surrounded by other woman with similar experiences, the shelter helps
them get back on their feet and then to find jobs to support themselves.
"Once that whole investment
process can happen with these young women then it is much easier for
them to have their own lives," says Diep.
Her
organization also does community outreach to try and stop more girls
from falling into the hands of traffickers. About once a month, a group
of trafficking victims visits the market at Bac Ha, a regional hub for
buying food, fabric and livestock. On this day, on a stage overlooking
hundreds of shoppers, they talk about their experiences, take questions
and play games with the crowd. When they ask people to share personal
experiences concerning trafficking, more than 20 people come forward.
"I think awareness is the only tool," Diep says.
Ha
from the U.N. agrees that the top priority is to spread awareness,
especially in the poor, rural regions along the border. She also
believes reducing poverty will help stop women going to China seeking
work, another common way traffickers lure victims.
Saved at the border
During
CNN's trip to the border, the government called and told us the police
had just rescued five girls as they were about to cross the border with a
trafficker. We met the girls, who are just 14 years old. They said they
were promised $600 to go to work in China by a neighbor from the same
village. They didn't tell their parents they were going. The neighbor is
now under arrest.
The Vietnamese
police are sometimes able to rescue women even after they have crossed
into China, by enlisting the help of Chinese authorities. Nguyen Tuong
Long, the head of the government's social vice prevention department in
Lao Cai, says last year they rescued and returned 109 Vietnamese
trafficking victims.
"Because of
cooperation between the Vietnamese and the Chinese police, we have found
and caught trafficking rings," Nguyen says. "We've found women far
inside China, at brothels where they're forced to become sex workers."
Trafficked women who aren't rescued in raids have to find ways to get out on their own.
Some
of them say they were able to contact their families from China, but
they couldn't get help from police because they didn't know exactly
where they were.
Lan and Nguyen
ended up in the same town in China. After two years, together they
managed to slip out of their homes and take a taxi to a local police
station. The whole time they were afraid their husbands' families would
find them. The Chinese police investigated and eventually returned them
to Vietnam.
The women were free of their forced marriages, but they paid a high price. Both left their babies in China.
Lan
says if she saw her daughter again, she would apologize for leaving her
behind. "I hope she'll have a better life there," she says.
Both
Lan and Nguyen say in school their teachers had talked to them about
trafficking. At the time, neither believed it could happen to them.
Photos: Vietnamese girls smuggled into China to become child brides
Vietnamese
girls as young as 13 are taken to China by human traffickers, to be
sold as brides. Pictured, girls reading leaflets designed to educate
them about the threat of sex trafficking at a market in Northern
Vietnam.
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