Escaping the Clutches of Human Traffickers

The article is written by Ngo Thi Huong and Nguyen Thi Binh*. They are members of Nang Hong Children’s Club, which is run as part of World Vision-implemented End Trafficking in Persons (ETIP) Programme in Nong Son ADP.

Our names are Ngo Thi Huong and Nguyen Thi Binh and we are 16-year-old high school students from Nong Son district in Quang Nam province. We both joined World Vision-established Nang Hong Children’s Club in August 2012 and have been members since then.

Recently, the club held a training course about human trafficking, which we went to with our parents. Neither of us knew anything about human trafficking before the course, so it was very useful. We learned about what traffickers do, how they capture people, and why they do it.

Mr. Thanh, who is a volunteer with World Vision, also gave us a leaflet about trafficking, which outlines ten actions we can take to prevent it from happening. He told us that the leaflet had been produced by World Vision’s ETIP programme.

We now know the underhand means traffickers use to lure people and where they may end up after being trafficked. We’re a lot more vigilant when we go out now and we never go alone anymore.

Hopefully, what we learned means we’ll never be victims of trafficking. But, it still happens! At the beginning of this year, some people took one of our friends from the village closest to ours. Her name is Ms. Tran Thi Men* and the traffickers approached her as she was going to school.

They knew she wanted to earn some money to help her family, so they suggested that she go to Ho Chi Minh City to learn to be a hairdresser. They gave her a bit of money and a telephone card and she was gone.

Her family found out she was not at school in the afternoon of the day she disappeared. They were distraught because she was a good girl and hardly ever skipped school.

Mr. Thanh and some of the villagers, who’d been at the human trafficking training, realised that she might have been trafficked. They told her family to report her disappearance to the district police, but they were unable to find any information about where she’d gone.

Suddenly, one day, I received a call – it was Men. “I’m going to get a real job. I’ll be able to earn money for my family and buy nice clothes,” she said. “You can get a job here too! I’ll give you the address and you can come,” she continued. Her words were positive, but her voice was sad.

I wrote down the address and remembered what I’d learned about human trafficking from the training course and leaflet, as well as in school and from my mother. We passed on the address to her family straightaway and they called her brothers, who live in Ho Chi Minh City.

The brothers and some of their friends went to the address and found Men there with three other girls. The criminals didn’t have any time to react and they were forced to let Men go.

One week later, Men returned home with her brothers. She’d been missing for two weeks and she looked different to before. She’s dropped out of school now, unfortunately, and just stays at home with her parents.

We believe that if she’d known about human trafficking through school and the ETIP programme, the traffickers probably wouldn’t have been able to take her.

Names of the people in this story have been changed.