Several trafficking victims survived horrific ordeals and returned home this year, but thoughts go to those who did not, have not made it.
A straightforward fact: Vietnam is a human trafficking hotspot, and the trade nets annual profits worth tens of billions of U.S. dollars.
The country has recorded over 3,400 victims of human trafficking since 2013, over 90 percent of them women, children and people from ethnic minority communities. Most victims are from rural communities or poor areas, who either work in agriculture, are uneducated or unemployed.
80 percent of victims end up in China, which suffers from one of the worst gender imbalance rates due to its one-child policy and illicit abortion of female fetuses by parents wanting sons, leading to increasing trafficking of Vietnamese women and baby girls. Other destinations include other Asian countries and territories like Cambodia, Laos, South Korea or Thailand, and European ones like the U.K., France or Germany.
Some of the women and children are tricked and sold to traffickers. Victims are lured by the simple wish to lead better lives and help their families, but many end up suffering abuse, being locked up, beaten, raped to beget children and treated as slaves, for all practical purposes.
Many are unable to find help or a way to contact their families, and several of the lucky few who do find a way and are rescued, continue to lead traumatized lives.
There are stories of people who fought their circumstances, of tearful reunions, of good Samaritans, and of heartbreaking outcomes.
Second effort
 Son (L) hugs her mother as she returns to her hometown in Bac Lieu Province, July 30, 2019. Photo courtesy of Blue Dragon. |
Son, 16, is a native of Bac Lieu Province in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Her mother became mentally unstable after her father abandoned them when she was a small child. Stuck in such a situation that was exacerbated by poverty, Son soon dropped out of school.
When she was 11, a woman in her neighborhood suggested that she goes to work in China and earn money to help herself and her mother. Son agreed without a second thought.
Little did she know that she was being trafficked to China, where she was sold to a much older Chinese man. She kept trying to escape, and once, when she succeeded, she fell into the arms of another trafficking ring and was sold to another Chinese man.
But she never gave up. Son managed to find a way to use a mobile phone and get in touch with a friend on social media. The friend made a call back to Son’s family in Vietnam.
Her family then reported her plight to the local police. She was eventually rescued in July with the help of the Blue Dragon Children’s foundation, a Hanoi-based nonprofit organization that rescues Vietnamese women and girls trafficked to China for the sex trade as well as forced labor.
Three-month escape plan
 Nguyen with her daughter as she returns to Vietnam on July 30, 2019. Photo courtesy of Blue Dragon. |
Nguyen became a single mother with two kids after her divorce several years ago. She took them back to her mother’s house in Vinh Long Province in the Mekong Delta.
Mired in poverty, Nguyen took the advice of several relatives and decided to leave her children for her mother to look after while she worked in a factory in China.
As soon as she set foot in China in October last year, Nguyen was sold to a Chinese man. He and his family took all of her personal papers and when she refused to obey them, she was repeatedly beaten and locked up.
While she was eventually allowed to work at a factory as she had been promised, all her earnings went into their pockets.
Like Son, she managed to use a mobile phone to contact her family in Vietnam and inform them of her situation.
A three-month operation, also by Blue Dragon, managed to rescue her in July by instructing her to gradually gain trust of the Chinese family, wait for them to let her go outside by herself, then escape.
A Facebook video goes a long way
 Nguyen Thi Lan (below), who was trafficked to China, is seen in a screenshot of a video call with her mother in Nghe An Province, Vietnam. Photo by Vietnam News Agency. |
Le Thi Lan, from the central province of Nghe An, was just 19 when she was tricked and sold to a Chinese man 24 years ago.
In 1995, Lan went to work in a district around 100 kilometers away from her home and stayed with her employer.
She was tricked by a neighbor and taken to neighboring Thanh Hoa Province before being transported to Guangxi Province in southern China and sold to a 65-year-old man for VND7 million ($300 now/$636 then).
She had four children with the man who constantly abused and beat her up. She tried to escape many times in vain, and would be locked up in a dark room after she was caught. She was even given drugs every day to make her forget her original family and home.
After several years, the family sold her to another Chinese man, with whom she lived for two years. The new man, 43, treated her well and even gave her permission and money to find her way back home.
In July, she met a Vietnamese woman working in Guangxi who offered to shoot a video of her telling her story and the names and addresses of her parents in Vietnam. She posted the video on Facebook, which was widely shared and eventually seen by Lan’s sister-in-law, Thao.
Lan’s Vietnamese had gone rusty after years of living in China and not using the language. Nevertheless, she stayed in touch with her family through video calls before finally reuniting with them the same month.
A neighbor in need
 Nguyen Thi Bien (L) sits with her father in their house in Bac Giang Province, northern Vietnam, after 28 years being trafficked to China. Photo by Vietnam News Agency. |
Nguyen Thi Bien was born into a poor family and was not able to finish her elementary school. She began working in the fields at a young age and occasionally as a baby sitter in her hometown in Hiep Hoa District, Bac Giang Province.
In 1991, when she was 23, she befriended a man she remembers only as Quang. He said he would help her go to China where she could easily find jobs, and she agreed.
She left with him for China without informing her family.
After they crossed the border, Quang sold her to a Chinese man and disappeared. She was taken to a house in a remote area and treated like a prisoner. Without any knowledge of China or its language, she could not think of how to get out or escape and find her way back home.
She was made to work and spent most of the time on farms. Except to work or eat, she was never let out of the house.
Gradually, she even forgot how to write Vietnamese.
This February, she was found by local police who raided several houses at the time. They detained her for two weeks to investigate, before taking her to the border along Vietnam’s Lang Son Province and send her home. Along with her were seven other northern Vietnamese women who had also been tricked and sold in China. Together they walked around 10 kilometers through a forest to reach Lang Son’s capital town before splitting up.
In Lang Son, she accidentally met Tran Van Huynh, a trader from her native Hiep Hoa District. Huynh posted her photos and information on social media along with the names of her parents and address in Vietnam, and the information finally reached Bien’s family. On August 2, Huynh took her back to Bac Giang with him and she was eventually reunited with her family, 28 years after she was trafficked.
Bien has been given a job affixing company labels on bags produced by a garment factory in the northern Bac Giang Province. She gets less than VND100,000 ($4.32) a day.
Her time in China has severely affected her mental state. She constantly switches between coherence and saying random things; her memory is jumbled.
“Sometimes she still thinks she’s in her 20s, sometimes she thinks I kicked her out of the house,” her father says.
Returned as ashes
 The picture of Pham Thi Tra My attached to her father Pham Van Thin’s letter to authorities. Photo by VnExpress/Duc Hung. |
“I’m sorry Mum. My journey abroad hasn’t succeeded. Mum, I love you so much! I’m dying because I can’t breathe … I’m from Nghen, Can Loc, Ha Tinh, Vietnam … I am sorry, Mum.”
The final text message from 26-year-old Pham Thi Tra My was one that horrified the world.
It came in the wake of the discovery on October 23 of 39 dead bodies in a refrigerated truck in the U.K.
A few days later, Pham Van Thin of Can Loc District in the central province of Ha Tinh Province, sent a letter to the People’s Committee of Nghen Town, saying his daughter was likely one of the 39 people found dead in a container truck in the Waterglade Industrial Park, Grays Town.
“My daughter, Pham Thi Tra My, left Vietnam on October 3, 2019, then travelled to China, France and England,” Thin wrote in the letter, which had My’s photo attached. She was described as 1.5 meters tall and weighing around 46 kilograms.
In the following few days, several people in Ha Tinh and Nghe An Province started to report missing family members in the U.K. Some sent pictures of their missing children to relatives and acquaintances living in the U.K. and asked them to contact local authorities to help identify the victims.
After initial suspicion that the bodies were of Chinese nationals, it was confirmed that all of them were Vietnamese.
After excruciating weeks, families started getting phone calls from British authorities, informing that their children were among the 39 deceased.
They were parents, children and grandchildren among them, one as young as 15. They had paid huge sums of money to be trafficked to the U.K., where they could get earn more and send money back home.
Nguyen Thi Phong, My’s mother said: “I advised My to stay home and get a husband, but she told me she would go on just this trip and earn money to pay our debt, get her parents out of poverty, then consider marriage later.”
The remains, bodies and ashes, returned home to Vietnam at the end of November.
Source: Vnexpress