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Read this report in:   THAI  |  MANDARIN

Born into a peasant family in this province some 50 kilometres north of the capital Hanoi, Than Thi Dieu is a typical rural teenager in Vietnam, with a strong body and swarthy complexion.

The 16-year-old is clever and self-confident, but gets embarrassed when meeting people from outside her small commune.

Dieu was quite different just three years ago. She was very thin and pale, recovering from the gloomy days she spent living in a near, but alien land — China — after falling prey to human traffickers.

One day in 1999, an aunt encouraged her to go for a new, easier life outside her rural surroundings, offering her a job at a shop in Vo Chai district some 50 km away in the north-eastern province of Lang Son, near the border with China.

Eager to discover new worlds beyond her village, she went despite her parents' objections.

She was sold three times — twice to brothel owners and then to a Chinese family across the border in China's city of Namning in south-western Yunnan province, but later escaped her traffickers.

"Afraid of being forced to become a prostitute, I made up my mind to flee," Dieu says, recalling with tears the time she tried to escape from one brothel owner but was caught and beaten up.

Her ordeal began when instead of being brought to the shop where she was supposed to work at the Tan Thanh border gate, which leads to Pingxiang city in China's Guangxi region, Dieu's relatives brought her to a brothel owner. This man sold her to another brothel owner, who then brought her across the border and then resold her to a Chinese family in Namning.

On the night she was brought to the family home, "I climbed over a high gate and fell down, bruising my left leg. I had to hide every time I heard a vehicle coming. I was really terrified that I would be caught again."

Two Chinese girls she came across the next day brought her to a police station. Chinese border authorities then coordinated with their Vietnamese counterparts to arrange her trip home, and her month-long ordeal finally ended.

At 40, Nguyen Thi My was much older than Dieu when she was deceived into thinking she would get a real job at the border with China.

When a friend promised her a job with a monthly pay of 600,000 Vietnamese dong (40 U.S. dollars) at the northern border gate, she leapt at the chance. "Such an offer was beyond the nicest dream of a woman villager like me," recalls My, also from Bac Giang.

After all, she was struggling to look after her three-year-old son after her husband left her. She worked hard on crop fields, but could not afford many of their basic needs.

On the way to the border gate, she recalls, a man gave her a wet towel and told her to wash her face. "I did not know anything after that because the towel had been soaked in anaesthetic. When I woke up, I could hear people around speaking a strange language that I could not understand," she adds.

"Finally I realised that I had been sold to a Chinese man for a forced marriage," says My, who ended up living in China's Guangxi province, which borders Vietnam, for 11 years.

Despite their age difference, Dieu and My had something in common — they were searching for new lives. Those most vulnerable to trafficking are not only experienced teenagers but gullible older women seeking job opportunities and better lives.

Dieu and My are but two among the many Vietnamese women sold to across the Chinese border as sex workers or as wives to Chinese men, including in places where China's one-child policy has often resulted in a lack of local brides.

As of May 2002, nearly 10,400 women have been sold by human traffickers to China. Another 12,000 were trafficked to Taiwan, according to the General Department of People's Police in Vietnam.

A further 10,000 women aged 18 to 40 have been misled into Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau and even the United States. The rise in trafficking is linked to loose controls at the border, which have come with more open borders. The market economy is also seen to have fuelled social evils like trafficking.

Dieu was lucky because she escaped before actually being sold to clients. Many other women remain in places like China, unable to go back to their homes and families.

After her 11 years in China, My returned to Bac Giang early this year. "I was still lucky as my Chinese husband was a poor but kind farmer. Sympathetic to my circumstances and because of my undaunted will, finally he gave me some money and said I could return home as I wished," My says.

Like other survivors of trafficking, My and Dieu found it difficult to put back the pieces of their lives when they returned home.

After returning to her native village, Dieu discovered that her parents had separated. Her father had thought that her mother had sold her to the traffickers.

Similarly, My's joy of reunion with her family was marred by seeing the impact her absence has had on the little son she had left behind. "I'm very sad as my son remains illiterate," she confides, noting that he could not go to school without his mother's care.

"It is not easy for returnees to overcome their own complex," says Nguyen Thi Bac, deputy chairwoman of the Bac Giang Women's Union. They need support from the community as a whole and groups like the local chapter of the Vietnam Women's Union (VWU), she says.

In May, the union went on a fact-finding trip to the northern border provinces and to southern China to find ways to better address the cross-border human trade.

Vietnam's national and local governments also have programmes to ease the adjustment of returnees, providing them job opportunities or soft credit for small businesses.

Efforts are underway to educate women and children, especially in rural areas, about the risks of human trafficking.

The VWU has opened in Bac Giang province a training course on the fight against trafficking under the U.N. International Agency Project on Trafficking in Women and Children in Mekong Subregion.

Better coordination among law enforcement bodies is also needed as trafficking becomes more sophisticated.

In 2000, 213 cases involving 351 people linked to trafficking were brought to trial, according to Vietnamese officials. The figures soared to 256 cases involving 438 people in 2001.

(Ta Thu Giang, a reporter for 'Vietnam News' in Hanoi, wrote this article under the IPS/Rockefeller Foundation media fellowship programme 'Our Mekong: A Vision amid Globalisation'.)