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‘Children in a dog cage’: how coronavirus puts Asia’s most vulnerable at greater risk of homelessness, human trafficking
- Closed schools and growing unemployment are making impoverished children easy prey for predators
- Lockdowns are leaving victims of human trafficking and abuse, including forced brides in China, more trapped than ever
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In Ha Giang, on Northern Vietnam’s border with China, dozens of ethnic minority communities live untouched by modernity, scattered between limestone pinnacles, snaking roads and dramatic valleys.
In more normal times, many of the children born into these communities are cared for in government-run boarding schools. But, since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus these schools have shut, forcing the children to return to their homes, where many find broken families, domestic violence and little to eat.
For brothers Bao and Dai*, aged 5 and 7, returning to their village meant they did not have food on the table. Their mother left years ago, their father is an alcoholic. The children had no option but to head to a large town, to beg and search for food.
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For about a month, Bao and Dai wandered aimlessly, sleeping under a bridge when they had no energy to go on. They were rescued a couple of weeks ago by the non-profit Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation and are now being looked after by a foster family. There are many others like them.
“Government agencies in Ha Giang province estimate that 1,600 children are experiencing a similar situation to that of the two brothers,” says Nam Xuan Pham, manager of Blue Dragon’s local programme.
The coronavirus has infected more than a million people and killed more than 50,000 across the globe. But experts say there are also many secondary victims, whose hard lives have been made harder still. Among the worst hit are underprivileged children and women – some of them in forced marriages in China – while similar tales of neglect can be found across the region, from Vietnam and India to the Philippines and Thailand. Support groups, which are now struggling to reach out to the most vulnerable, warn that the coming months will leave many more at risk of human trafficking and exploitation.
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