From Vietnam, without love: the child brides of China
In the rural mountains of Vietnam, young girls are disappearing from their homes with increasing regularity. Many turn up across the border, sold as wives for the price of a buffalo
It was 8pm on a scorching summer night when Tien, a quiet, timid teenager, left her home in a coastal province of central Vietnam, supposedly to spend the night at her cousin’s. Or at least, that is what the 16-year-old had told her family. In fact, she planned to leave the village to escape the pressure on her to get married. Hoping her cousin would help her find a job, she slipped out the door.
It was nearly two years before she would return, by then having endured horrors beyond the imagination of most teenagers. The cousin she had trusted, rather than finding her a job, had sold her to a human trafficking broker in China who resold her as a bride. Tien became part of a depressing new statistic: the growing number of impoverished Vietnamese children being sold into forced marriages in China.
Tien had realised early on that something was amiss. “I gave her all of my money and my ID card,” Tien recalls. “She told me, ‘we’re going to find work. You said you wanted to leave that village so I’m taking you’.”
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Her cousin had promised to take her to the big cities in the south, but instead they headed north, to the capital Hanoi. They switched vehicles in the capital and Tien fell asleep. When she woke, she was in China, where her cousin abandoned her after selling her to a trafficking broker.
Tien soon learned the broker had already matched her with a husband. She put up a fight, refusing to leave the broker’s house for four months, but eventually gave in, having met a fellow Vietnamese who told her the only way to escape the country would be to learn Chinese – and that the best way to do so would be to marry. So she let her broker find her a new match.
Tien’s ordeal is far from unique. Disappearances like hers have become so frequent in some rural areas of Vietnam many villagers assume that if a girl has been missing for more than a couple of days she must already be on the other side of the border.
Official statistics from Vietnam’s Department of General Police show that between 2011 and 2017, there were 2,700 reported cases of human trafficking, involving nearly 6,000 victims mainly from poor families in rural areas, with little access to education or economic opportunities. The official figures are widely thought to be dwarfed by the number of unreported cases. Police say selling children as brides is rife in provinces near the border with China and is on the rise.