John Boudreau Article: "In Vietnam, Teenage Daughters Sold Into Sex Slavery"

It is amazing how the naïve poor are tricked and bribed into sex trafficking. They explore through dumps in the hopeful search for anything that they could use, or possibly eat. Of course, they don’t have much of a choice: most are uneducated and inexperienced. So when people offer jobs poor daughters to “work in a café in a different city”, it is no surprise that the families quickly comply, thinking that they will soon live better lives. Instead, the teenage girls are brought to their doom.

I cannot say that I wouldn’t do the same thing. If I were poor, illiterate, and unaware of the issues of slavery and human trafficking, I would’ve agreed to the “café job”. Truong and her family (and any other victimized families of sex trafficking) are not at fault. Just as Diep Vuong stated, “If you don’t know how to read the public announcements or have enough money for newspapers and you barely have enough to eat, how can you understand there are risks?”

What is really troublesome is the fact that some families are not even tricked. They willingly accept money for their daughters to be a victim of sex trafficking. The people that offer the families thousands of dollars in a trade for their daughter’s body are low; but I think the families that agree to the trade are even lower. No human being should be bought, sold, traded, or anything of the sort, especially family members.

There were about 6,700 victims of sex trafficking in Vietnam last year. What’s even worse is that the actual statistics maybe even higher. Though the Vietnam government have no resources to put a stop to sex trafficking, it is good to hear that some Vietnamese authorities, like the police, as the article states, are providing some help. It may not be much, but it is definitely a start.

The girls were lucky to have escaped, unlike the reported 6,700+ victims last year. However, Truong’s comments at the end of the article confused me. It kind of seemed like Truong doesn’t know how lucky she is: “If it had happened, it would have been because it was my destiny. That’s the life.” It is no one’s fate to be sold and trafficked into sex slavery.