Trafficking nightmare

By Ma Guihua The trafficking of young girls for sex and entertainment from south-western China's Yunnan Province to neighbouring Asian countries is a harsh reality today.

Many girls, about 70 per cent below 18 years, have been trafficked from Simao, Lincang and Xishuangbanna in southern Yunnan to Thailand, Malaysia and other south-east Asian countries for sex in the last decade, reveals Xian Yanming, Deputy Chief of the Yunnan Provincial Public Security Department.

According to Child Workers in Asia, a support group for child workers based in Bangkok, many Chinese girls are employed in Thailand mainly for sexual entertainment purposes.

One of the most vulnerable areas to trafficking is Menghai County in Xishuangbanna, which shares a long border (146.5 kms) with Myanmar.

Official figures show that a total of 1,041 women from Menghai crossed the border and entered Myanmar by 2000, and later traveled to Thailand and Malaysia.

The nearest point from Yunnan to Thailand is only 200 km.

Some of these young girls, like Yu Lian, returned to China after many years, and with tragic tales.

Almost a decade ago, a young male villager approached Lian, then 18, and her cousin and talked them into "buying gold" in Thailand with travel expenses all covered by him.

The two girls left their village in Menghai and followed the man on a mountain trail, from Small Mengla to Kengtung (in Myanmar), sleeping only when they could walk no more.

Lian had never been out of her village before she set out on this journey.

When they reached Mae Sai on the Thai border after several days of trekking, the man left them, and a Thai woman in her 40s escorted them to Bangkok and finally to a nightclub in the city.

It was here that they realised the real purpose of the trip: they were to work as nightclub waitresses.

However, Lian and her cousin, with a little help from other club girls, managed to go to a police station.

But from here they were taken to a child centre on an island and kept there for the next two years.

Then one day, Lian agreed to go with a Malaysian to work for him as a housemaid.

When the Malaysian died of cancer in 1999, his aunt sought help from the Chinese Embassy and Lian was sent back home.

Lian was not the only one in her village who had fallen into the trap of the traffickers.

Her sister, now a tour guide on a deluxe cruise where foreigners go fishing in Phuket, Thailand, was cheated and trafficked in 1994.

Says Lian, "She had been cheated by a married couple in the village." Trafficking in girls has been a problem in the border areas of Yunnan since the 1980s when China opened its border, observes Yu Hanbian, who works with the Women's Federation of Mengzhe Township in Menghai.

"Many people on either side of the border speak the same language and share similar customs.

Local residents have been moving fairly freely across the border for a long time," she says.

"From Manlai village alone, seven girls were trafficked, mostly by friends or relatives." Several of the trafficked girls belong to ethnic communities in Yunnan Province.

A study conducted during the Mekong Sub-Regional Project to Combat Trafficking in Children and Women (supported by the International Labour Organisation), found that more than 5,000 rural residents of Menghai, two-thirds being women, were leaving their villages to seek work elsewhere every year.

Nearly 40 per cent of these migrants sought work outside China.

The driving force behind this migration is poverty.

In rural Menghai, per capita income is less than Yuan 1,000 (US$1=Yuan 8.30).

Besides poverty, says Yanming, lack of education and information about the outside world make the young girls more vulnerable.

Vorasakdi Mahatdhanobol, a researcher at Thailand's Chulalongkorn University, who has been a volunteer interpreter for the Centre for the Protection of Children's Rights Foundation (CPCR) in Thailand, found that all the 35 Chinese women CPCR rescued from Thai brothels from 1991 to 1993 were from Simao and Xishuangbanna.

"Sightseeing and job offers are sops to lure the girls out of their villages.

Since the China-Myanmar border has no human or natural barriers, one can hardly stop the girls from sneaking into foreign land," writes Mahatdhanobol in his book 'Chinese Women in the Thai Sex Trade'.

Since 1997, says CPCR, trafficking networks have become more organised, and it's much more difficult to get tip-offs on trafficked women and children.

Hanbian agrees that the number of trafficked women is now anybody's guess because very few report to the police.

In China, the Criminal Procedure Law provides that traffickers who sell women and children abroad or for sexual exploitation are liable to at least 10 years of imprisonment.

However, justice is not easily done if victims file lawsuits years after trafficking takes place.

There is insufficient evidence and many choose silence over social stigma.

Moreover, in the absence of effective cooperation between China and the neighbouring countries, the Chinese police are relatively powerless to act against cross-border trafficking.

Sociologists like Zhang Jie, who is a researcher with the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, are concerned about the impact of trafficking on the lives of ethnic communities.

"Minority people who have been at peace with nature for generations are marginalised and overwhelmed by the mainstream culture in the globalisation tide." In her research, she has found that many women, once trafficked abroad, seem to be uprooted and don't feel at home on either side, even after they are rescued and repatriated.

Says Jie, "These girls and their material gains may arouse envy among other girls at home.

But their future is simply uncertain." _WFS About us | Advertise | Other Publications | Subscriptions | Weather | Letters | Send Mail Disclaimer: Information is being made available at this site purely as a measure of public facilitation.

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