Risk of returning to Vietnam for single mothers who have been trafficked and/or smuggled to a foreign country
From: Sidel, Mark <mark-sidel@uiowa.edu>
Date: 2008/10/19
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Dear VSG colleagues,
I am trying to provide some information to a government authority on the risk of return to Vietnam for a single mother who was trafficked and/or smuggled to a
foreign country and has had a child in that country under non-voluntary, trafficking conditions. Do any of you know of any literature or information on the risk to such
a single mother on return to Vietnam (with the child, no father identified) in such circumstances, or on how other such cases have been treated?
Either on- or off-line, whichever you prefer.
Many thanks....
Mark Sidel
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From: Joseph Hannah <jhannah@u.washington.edu>
Date: Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 1:52 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Mark and all,
I am not sure if this is useful for your purposes, but here goes:
In my research among local NGOs in TPHCM, I ran across the "Little
Rose" (Hong Nho) girls' shelter. A number of the girls there had been
trafficked to Cambodia for commercial sex work, had escaped back to
Vietnam, and were being housed and cared for in the shelter because
they could not return home.
The reasons given for why they could not return were varied -- social
stigma, etc., being common. But one reason caught me by surprise:
Oftentimes, I was told, the child was contracted to work as a
"domestic" or "in a coffee shop" by middlemen who paid a fee to the
parents of the girl. (It seems very unlikely to me that the parents
were not aware of the circumstances of their daughter's "employment,"
but humans are capable of suspending disbelief and of "cognitive
dissonance" in an extraordinary range of evil circumstances...) If the
girl escaped her employers and made her way home, the middleman was
likely to return and a) take her back, b) demand repayment of the fee
(with interest) and/or c) beat the living daylights out of the
parents. Such conditions prevented many of the returned girls from
returning home to their families, according to the directors of the
shelter.
Such circumstances are not directly related to the case of a single
mother returning home, but I think they form an important part of the
political economy of trafficking, enslavement, and violence these
girls find themselves in.
Best,
Joe Hannah