V I E T N A M
Trading in Children
by Tran Dinh Thanh Lam
HO CHI MINH CITY — Six-year-old Tran Thi Be was dead tired, but had to keep running after people on the street and ask them to spare some change. ''Please, help my blind mother,'' she urged passersby, while an obviously underfed woman sat beside her.
Despite Be's efforts begging all day in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, she was unable to earn the sum expected by her 'blind mother' who is actually not her mother at all, but her boss for-the-day.
Be is just one among hundreds of children trafficked annually to this southern Vietnamese city to fill a swelling army of drug vendors, prostitutes and beggars.
She fell into the hands of a child trafficker two years ago and has become his 'asset' ever since. Her keeper 'manages' a dozen children, ranging from one to 12 years of age, whom he rents out to professional beggars looking to improve their earning prospects.
Le Thi Anh is one of these. She fled her parents to follow her boyfriend to Ho Chi Minh City when she was 18, but he later sold her into prostitution. Now 43, Anh knows nothing other than a working life of begging on the streets.
Each day she pays the gang a visit and for 5,000 Vietnamese dong (32 U.S. cents) she rents a child like Be.
Like other full-time beggars, Anh believes that the sight of a woman carrying a weak and emaciated baby - or accompanied by a crying, helpless child - is more touching for the average streetwalker and can make her effort potentially more lucrative.
Like many other parts of Asia and elsewhere, trafficking in children and women has been on the increase in Vietnam in recent years. Forced into a life of bonded labour, begging, prostitution, pornography and or other illegal activities such as the drugs trade, many young Vietnamese women and children end up as far afield as China, Taiwan, Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Macau and Europe.
According to Asia Against Child Trafficking (Asia ACT), between 1982 and 1997, around 80,000 women and children from Cambodia, Laos, Burma and Vietnam were forced to work in the Thai sex industry. Asia ACT also said hundreds of thousands of children are being enslaved and sold every year.
''Child trafficking is one of the most vicious forms of violence and crime against children since it involves the removal of children from their family surroundings to face alien and dangerous situations,'' said Dr Duong Quang Trung, chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Child Welfare Foundation.
This city accounts for nearly 25,000 working children, some of who are taken from their parents and sold to others who 'raise' them into a life of modern-day slavery.
More than 50 percent of these children work around eight to 12 hours a day. Nearly 14 percent of teenage children work as prostitutes - a figure that experts believe has increased sharply in recent years.
Take the case of 16-year-old Le Thi Anh Thu, who has no idea who her parents are. The only family she knows is that of an 'uncle and aunty' that she used to live with in the northern province of Tay Ninh.
''I had to work hard every day, waking early in the morning to sell vegetables,'' she recalled, "when I was unable to sell anything, I had nothing to eat," Thu told a seminar here on child trafficking in the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) in July.
This was Thu's daily routine until the day she was raped by her 'uncle'. The orphan then fled to Ho Chi Minh City, where she had to run the gamut of pimps and child traffickers who tried to lure her into selling herself.
It was only with the help of the Little Rose Warm Shelter in the city's District 7, set up by government officials and civic groups, that Thu succeeded in ''avoiding these tricks''.
Vietnam's Criminal Code includes severe penalties for traffickers who take women and children abroad for prostitution and other forms of exploitation like illegal adoption and the trade in human organs.
While traffickers sometimes operate on a small scale, they may also be highly organised and sophisticated, with ringleaders often passing themselves off within their communities as upright citizens.
Sometimes, child traffickers are relatives or friends well known to the child. ''Uncle Ba told my mother that if I agreed to marry a Taiwanese boss, he would give us 15 million dong (980 U.S dollars) to pay our debt,'' Le Thi Vinh Bao told police here.
The sixteen-year-old girl was among a dozen freed by the police earlier in July, when they cracked open a ring selling young brides to Taiwanese men.
Taiwanese bridegrooms, the majority of them old and invalid, often pay 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. dollars to brokers like 'Uncle Ba' so as to marry a Vietnamese girl.
Police report that business has been so lucrative recently that a horde of 'matchmakers' like Ba are roaming the countryside in search of desperate youngsters who want to escape their socio-economic predicament by marrying rich Taiwanese men.
