Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of my new posts by email. And thank you! Sign me up! Kiab makes her bed in the centre she now lives in. When Kiab turned just 16, her brother promised to take her to a party in a tourist town in northern Vietnam. Instead, he sold her to a Chinese family as a bride. The ethnic Hmong teenager spent nearly a month in China until she was able to escape her new husband, seek help from local police and return to Vietnam.
The emotional impact on children and women thus betrayed must be almost as bad as the experiences they then suffer. As we noted in our recent article on prostitution in China , the most horrific fact is that Korean girls who are traded, kidnapped, and then escape and return home, can find themselves imprisoned or even executed.
China suffers from one of the worst gender imbalances in the world as families prefer male children. The Lao Cai shelter currently houses a dozen girls from various ethnic minority groups. All say they were tricked by relatives, friends or boyfriends and sold to Chinese men as brides. As trafficking is run by illegal gangs and the communities involved are poor and remote, official data is patchy and likely underestimates the scale of the problem, experts say.
It is likely that many of the girls end up working in brothels, but due to the stigma of being a sex worker they will usually report they were forced into marriage. Communist neighbours Vietnam and China share a mountainous, remote border stretching 1, kilometres, marked primarily by the Nam Thi river and rife with smuggling of goods of all kinds: fruit, live poultry and women.
In northern Vietnam, trafficking has become so acute that communities say they are living in fear. We always ask where she is going, and tell her not to talk on the phone or trust anyone. May Na, from the Hmong ethnic minority, was 13 when her uncle took her across the border and forced her to marry a Chinese man. They left me at home alone and I climbed over the wall and ran away. Her uncle has been arrested, she said, but she has chosen not to return to her own family.
