The New York-based human rights group has recorded cases of women from northern Myanmar being trafficked to China, where they are sold for $3,000 to $13,000 dollars. Other news reports have documented how thousands of women and girls from Cambodia, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam have also been sold into exploitation in China.
“Mum — they don’t give me a penny. They just keep me in the house. Maybe things will change when I give them a baby,” a woman from rural Cambodia messaged her mother after being lured to China on the false hope of work and wealth, the Reuters news wire reported.
A Vietnamese teenager misled and then kidnapped in Vietnam and trafficked to China told Singapore’s Channel News Asia in no uncertain terms what this fate meant.
“If you are trafficked, of course you will be raped. Probably everyone was raped,” she said. “I became a wife there [in China]. At that house, I had to obey everything they said or else I would be beaten. They beat me without fear because I am not Chinese.”
Thousands of women and girls from North Korea, some as young as 12, have been forced into marriages and prostitution, and subjected to other brutal abuse in China, in what the London-based Korea Future Initiative says is a multibillion-dollar industry there. Women and teenagers looking to flee the repressive state are a particular target.
Regionwide, traffickers prey on victims from impoverished, marginalized and minority communities, who usually have little information on what really lies ahead when a trafficker, middleman or even family member or acquaintance in on the scheme comes knocking and offers work or a new beginning abroad.
The number of single men China who in part drive these illegal networks is only growing. As The Washington Post’s Simon Denyer and Annie Gowen reported in 2018: “Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.”
But because the victims are often from marginalized communities within their home countries, the phenomenon of bride trafficking isn’t an issue leaders are keen to discuss as part of their bilateral relationship with China, said Heather Barr, the acting co-director of Human Rights Watch’s women’s rights division.
“There’s no country in Asia that has a symmetrical relationship with China,” Barr said. “The scale of influence and economic and political power is just so different between China and other countries in the region, and particularly the countries that are, so far, on the list of where trafficked brides are coming from.”
Now with China’s Belt and Road initiative, these countries “are more indebted, often literally, to China,” she said, adding, “It’s so increasingly clear that this is an issue across the whole region.”
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