Teen Girls Nearly Sold to China... Rescued from 'Forced Marriage' Crisis

"Deceived with 'We will get you a job' and taken to China
In China, forced marriages rampant due to gender imbalance"

Two Vietnamese teenage girls were rescued from the brink of being trafficked for forced marriage.

On the 8th, the local Vietnamese news outlet VN Express reported, “The police in Nghe An Province in the north-central region have arrested and are investigating two women, Hoai and Ngoc, on charges of trafficking minors under the age of 16.”

The police caught wind of the suspects’ plan to sell 14- and 15-year-old girls to China and arrested them after more than a month of investigation.

The suspects reportedly knew the girls’ families were in poor financial condition and deceived them by promising restaurant jobs, then kept the girls in Tuyen Quang Province near the Chinese border. The girls were returned to their families under police protection.

According to statistics from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the gender imbalance issue in China has become severe recently. This is because of the strong son preference among Chinese people, who have aborted female fetuses for decades due to the “one-child policy.”

As a result, rural Chinese men have turned to Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to find wives. While some marry through formal introductions and live happy lives, hundreds of thousands of cases involve abduction and kidnapping followed by forced marriage, where the women suffer from violence and forced labor.

Vietnamese Women Under 16 Arrested on Human Trafficking Charges
[Image Source=Captured from VN Express website]

In 2020, a Vietnamese woman who had been sold to China returned to her family after 27 years. Ms. Lo (54) disappeared in 1995 at the age of 27 while living with her older brother in Dak Lak Province, Vietnam.

Thanks to her family’s relentless search, Ms. Lo was able to return home. She revealed, “I was deceived by someone and taken to China, where I was forced to marry an older Chinese man and had children.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of State classified Vietnam as Tier 3, the lowest rank, in its “2022 Trafficking in Persons Report” released last year, which drew strong protests from the Vietnamese government.

The U.S. Department of State evaluates countries’ efforts to monitor and combat trafficking on a scale from Tier 1 to Tier 3. Tier 1 includes 30 countries such as the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Belgium, Canada, Chile, and Finland.

South Korea was downgraded from Tier 1 to Tier 2 in this report for the first time in 20 years. Tier 2 includes countries that do not meet all the criteria for preventing trafficking but are making continuous efforts. Norway, Japan, Switzerland, Ghana, and Mexico are among them. North Korea has been ranked Tier 3, the lowest tier, for 20 consecutive years.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.