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My is back in school now. She’s studying in Grade 11 high up in the mountains of north-west Vietnam, living in a boarding house because the journey from her home to school is too far to travel each day.
Seeing her with her classmates, she looks like any senior student and has all the same worries and burdens of any teenage school girl.
But My has also been through an experience few of us can fully understand. In February 2017, at age 15, she was trafficked and sold as a bride across the border in China.
My is a H’mong girl; her family lives high in mountains in a stilt house and her parents have little education. When their daughter first went missing, they didn’t realise for several days. They thought she was at school. The school thought she was at home. Nobody knew that she had been lured away by an experienced trafficking ring, then forcibly abducted and sold against her will.
It was well over a year before anybody knew what had happened to My. By all accounts, she had simply disappeared. Nobody had any idea where she was, until Vietnamese police intercepted some traffickers in the process of taking another victim across the border. Their arrest led to the information about My’s whereabouts, and Blue Dragon was able to send in a team to find her and bring her home.
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In the news articles and public discussions about human trafficking, there’s a lot of speculation as to the reasons people are trafficked.
People often assume that parents sell their children to make money, either out of desperation or wickedness. That may well happen, but in all of the 780+ cases that Blue Dragon has so far dealt with, we’ve only seen this once. (And within hours of the mother selling her son, she rang us begging to get him back).
So what is it? Poverty? Lack of education? Lack of opportunity?
Probably all of these factors play a part, and more besides. Vulnerability to trafficking is never one-dimensional; there are always multiple issues at play. It may be gender, but both genders are trafficked; it may be poverty, but wealthy people get trafficked too.
One particular vulnerability we see here in Vietnam is ethnicity. In a country of 90 million people, somewhere between 10 and 15% of the population belong to one of 53 ethnic minority communities such as the H’mong, each with their own distinct culture and language. Why is it “somewhere between 10 and 15%”? Precisely because people in these communities are less likely to have their births recorded and more likely to live in remote areas, official records of their lives are more difficult to capture. And so, enslavement and exploitation is vastly more likely.
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