
Human Trafficking In Vietnam: An
Update
By John E. Carey
Peace and Freedom
April 10, 2007
On Tuesday police in Ho Chi Minh City said that they had
broken up an illegal match-making business where eight South Korean men were
choosing potential “brides” from among 118 local young Vietnamese women.
Police in the raid Monday detained the Vietnamese couple who
had organized the business. The women were sent back to their home towns, mostly
in the poor Mekong Delta region.
“They thought their lives would change for the better if they
married a foreigner,” a police officer told reporters, adding that the women had
also been handed into the care of provincial communist women’s unions.
International marriages are legal in communist Vietnam, but
the match-making rings — where the women are typically paraded before men,
sometimes holding signs with numbers, for selection — are not, and the
phenomenon has stirred anger here.
Men in South Korea and Taiwan who can afford to “buy” women
use “matchmaking agencies” to serve as liaisons.
The U.S. Department of State has decried this behavior and
had urged Vietnam to work to put a stop to human trafficking.
Last year, the U.S. put Vietnam on a special watch list
because Vietnam was not meeting internationally recognized minimums for fighting
human trafficking.
Vietnam is not the only nation where this is a problem.
Young Thai girls and women and Cambodian females are also
highly prized by men with the financial resources to come to these countries for
women.
After visiting Vietnam and Cambodia, Human Rights activist
Hoi Trinh said, “the experience left me more aware of what poverty can do to
ordinary lives and less sympathetic to man’s tendency to abuse if left
unchecked.”
Vietnam has become a popular destination for bachelors from
South Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere searching for a women, often on week-long
marriage tours that include medical checkups, visa procedures and speedy
honeymoons.
The women are promised a better life but often end up with
their “husbands” confiscating their papers and passports and treating them as
sex slaves.
Asian women are often sent to America with promises of better
lives and they end up as prostitutes servicing as many as 70 men a day.
Last year Vietnam summoned South Korea’s press attache to
Hanoi amid angry protests from women’s groups after a newspaper in Seoul printed
a photo of a line-up of Vietnamese would-be brides kneeling before a Korean
suitor.
John E. Carey is former president of
International Defense Consultants, Inc. and a frequent contributor to The
Washington Times.

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