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Agence France-Presse

Two girls sprint from a hair salon into a car that will lead them back to safety in Vietnam – a snapshot of the daring rescues taking place each month to free women and girls from forced marriages or sex slavery in China.
Filmed on a shaky camera phone, the rescue of the Vietnamese teenagers saved them from a brothel in China, where a huge surplus of males has fuelled a lucrative trade in brides and sex workers.
Bringing them home is dangerous work, pitting rescuers against vengeful husbands, pimps and organised trafficking networks who make tens of millions of dollars selling women from poor countries along the Mekong river.

“No one wants their business to be broken,” says a rescuer from Blue Dragon, a Hanoi-based non-profit organisation.
Blue Dragon has helped bring about 400 trafficked women and girls home from China since 2007.
Tricked, lured or kidnapped and sold as wives and prostitutes across the border, they are among the tens of thousands taken to China from impoverished pockets of Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.
Rescues are a complicated and all-consuming job, says the Blue Dragon rescuer whose identity has been concealed for safety reasons.
The stress is constant and the phone buzzes around the clock. “But I couldn’t walk away,” the rescuer says. “Imagine your child didn’t come home at dinner time. What would you do?”

Victims reach out via Chinese messaging services like WeChat and QQ or call Blue Dragon – if they can get their hands on a phone.
“I was trafficked to China please help me,” reads one text. “I’m praying for a miracle,” says another.
But most girls – especially sex workers – are barred from contact with the outside world. An escaped girl means thousands of dollars lost for traffickers.
With risks high, each rescue can take months to plan and execute. One girl faked illness and checked into hospital where she called Blue Dragon rescuers, leading them to a remote corner of China where she had been trafficked as a bride.
Another who had been sold into a brothel secretly used customers’ phones to contact rescuers before evading bouncers by escaping via a back door.


Blue Dragon, which also rescues and rehabilitates street kids, sexual abuse victims and other kids in crisis, helps to bring home up to eight people a month and gets one or two desperate pleas for help each day.
Its staff keep photos and videos of successful missions – weeping mothers reunited with daughters, teenaged girls grinning widely after being saved – as morale-boosting reminders of their work.
“If we don’t get her out of there she’s stuck, she’s in slavery,” said the organisation’s founder, Australian Michael Brosowski.
Le Thi Vu knew trying to escape could mean being beaten or even killed by her pimp, who kept her in a brothel for four months in China’s Guangxi province where she was forced to sleep with up to 12 men a day.


Traumatised and fearing pregnancy, she secretly bought a phone and got in touch with her family who connected with Blue Dragon.
She had no idea of her location and could not read the Chinese street signs outside, but Vu – whose name has been changed – found a phone number for a hotel across the street and relayed it.
One morning two months later, the rescue unfolded.

She went into a hair salon next to the brothel with another Vietnamese woman and suddenly made a dash for the waiting car, praying not to get caught. Within days the pair were back in Vietnam.
“I felt like I had come back to life again, I was so happy to see my mother,” said Vu, now 21 and training to be a spa technician.
Rescues have helped Blue Dragon prosecute 76 traffickers over the past five years in Vietnam, where the maximum sentence for selling people outside the country is 20 years.
Vu’s traffickers – her friend and her friend’s boyfriend – were both jailed.
Nguyen Trang was saved last year, eight months into a forced marriage to a poor Chinese labourer in Hunan province.

UPDATE: Blue Dragon has rescued a #HumanTrafficking victim from China and she is now safely back in Vietnam. #EndHumanTrafficking pic.twitter.com/OPXctFPPQe
— Blue Dragon (@BlueDragonVN) September 14, 2018

She slipped out of the house early one morning to meet a Blue Dragon contact, who guided her onto a bus bound for the border.
She was offered $2,100 not to testify against her trafficker – a former boyfriend who sold her to brokers in China. But Trang, also using a pseudonym, refused and her ex was jailed in August for seven years.
Today, the slight 20-year-old works in a Hanoi restaurant and has tried to put the dark chapter behind her. “In Hunan my spirit hurt … now I can live again,” she says.
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Vietnam

Bringing back the Vietnamese women sold into sexual slavery and forced marriages in China

Daring rescues take place each month to free women and girls from forced marriages or sex slavery in China. Photo: Reuters

The icons for Tencent Holdings Ltd. applications WeChat, clockwise from top left, QQ, JOOX, Tencent News and Tencent Video are arranged for a photograph on an Apple Inc. iPhone in an arranged photograph taken in Hong Kong, China, on Wednesday, July 26, 2017. Tencent is scheduled to release second-quarter earnings figures on Aug 16. Photographer: Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg

This picture taken on November 22, 2018 shows Le Thi Vu, a Vietnamese woman who was rescued from a brothel in China's Guangxi province, sitting during an interview with Agence France-Presse in Hanoi. - Le Thi Vu -- whose name has been changed -- knew trying to escape could mean being beaten or even killed by her pimp, who kept her in a brothel for four months in China's Guangxi province where she was forced to sleep with up to 12 men a day. (Photo by Manan VATSYAYANA / AFP) / TO GO WITH STORY Mekong-China-women-trafficking-crime-rescues FEATURE by Jenny VAUGHAN

This picture taken on October 28, 2018 shows a money-changer carrying Chinese yuan at the Sunday market in Meo Vac, a mountainous border district between Vietnam's Ha Giang province and China. - Most people in this part of Vietnam have a story about bride trafficking. The victims come from poor communities and are tricked by boyfriends and sold, kidnapped against their will or move across the border by choice for marriage or the promise of work. (Photo by Nhac NGUYEN / AFP) / TO GO WITH Mekong-China-women-trafficking-crime-Vietnam, FOCUS by Jenny Vaughan and Tran Thi Minh Ha

How China’s massive gender imbalance drives surge in Southeast Asian women sold into marriage

Tens of thousands of young Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laos and Myanmar women marry Chinese men each year. Photo: AFP

TO GO WITH:China-Vietnam-Demographics-marriage-lifestyle,FEATURE by Tom Hancock This photo taken on July 30, 2014 shows shows 21-year-old Vietnamese bride Vu Thi Hong Thuy posing with a photo of her Chinese husband in Weijian village, in China's Henan province. More than 20 Vietnamese brides have found new lives in the poverty stricken rural township, the beneficiaries and sometimes victims of a trade serving farmers who cannot attract local partners in the face of a huge gender imbalance. AFP PHOTO/Greg BAKER

This photo taken on October 2, 2018 shows Nary (R), a Cambodian victim of forced marriage to a Chinese man, sitting with her mother on the steps of their family home in Phnom Penh. - Everyone did well from Nary's marriage to a Chinese man, except the young Cambodian bride herself, who returned home after a six-year ordeal destitute, humiliated and with little prospect of ever seeing her son again. Poverty drives many women from the Mekong region to gamble on marriage in China, double-locked by low education levels and a social expectation to provide for parents. Nary's name has been changed on her request. (Photo by TANG CHHIN Sothy / AFP) / TO GO WITH Mekong-China-women-trafficking-crime by Suy SE and Aidan JONES

TO GO WITH Cambodia-rights-property,FEATURE, Michelle FITZPATRICK Photo taken on October 4, 2010 shows Cambodian women walking through water on a wooden bridge at a village in Boeng Kak lake in Phnom Penh. As a construction company fills a lake with sand in the centre of the Cambodian capital, thousands of residents worry they will be the next victims in an epidemic of forced evictions across the country. AFP PHOTO/TANG CHHIN SOTHY

This photo taken on October 2, 2018 shows Nary, a Cambodian victim of forced marriage to a Chinese man, sitting with a cat at her family home in Phnom Penh. - Everyone did well from Nary's marriage to a Chinese man, except the young Cambodian bride herself, who returned home after a six-year ordeal destitute, humiliated and with little prospect of ever seeing her son again. Poverty drives many women from the Mekong region to gamble on marriage in China, double-locked by low education levels and a social expectation to provide for parents. Nary's name has been changed on her request. (Photo by TANG CHHIN Sothy / AFP) / TO GO WITH Mekong-China-women-trafficking-crime by Suy SE and Aidan JONES

(171007) -- BEIJING, Oct. 7, 2017 (Xinhua) -- A passenger takes a photo at Beijing Railway Station in Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 7, 2017. As the National Day holiday draws to its end, Beijing greets a large number of passengers back to work and college. (Xinhua/Shen Bohan) (lx)

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Since 2007, Blue Dragon has helped bring home about 400 women and girls who were tricked, lured or kidnapped and sold across the border


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Bringing back the Vietnamese women sold into sexual slavery and forced marriages in China

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}Since 2007, Blue Dragon has helped bring home about 400 women and girls who were tricked, lured or kidnapped and sold across the border

Since 2007, Blue Dragon has helped bring home about 400 women and girls who were tricked, lured or kidnapped and sold across the border