Kelley E. Currie,John Cotton RichmondandSamuel D. Brownback

Opinion | How China’s ‘missing women’ problem has fuelled trafficking and forced marriage

To prevent trafficking, countries must better train their immigration officers and boost socioeconomic conditions in vulnerable areas, while China should make a sustained effort to punish perpetrators and support victims

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Vu Thi Dinh, a Vietnamese mother, poses with a photograph of her missing teenage daughter Dua and her best friend, at her house in Meo Vac, a mountainous border district between Vietnam’s Ha Giang province and China, on October 27, 2018. Both girls are feared to have been sold as child brides. Photo: AFP

Kelley E. Currie,John Cotton RichmondandSamuel D. Brownback

Published: 6:45am, 13 Jan 2021Updated: 7:15am, 13 Jan 2021

For most, marriage holds the potential for a lifetime of love, family and partnership. Across rural China and around its periphery, however, women are being lured by false promises of good jobs and a better future, only to be trapped in forced marriages that are a nightmare of abuse, including sex trafficking and forced labour in some cases.

With human trafficking around the world on the rise, and as we, in the US, recognise National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, it is imperative that those who continue in this practice are held accountable.

Due to the legacy of the Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy, preference for male children and sex-selective abortion, researchers estimate that there are 30 million to 40 million women unaccounted for in China.

This gender imbalance has fuelled a huge unmet demand for marriage, especially among men in China’s rural areas. In response, girls and younger women from poorer countries on China’s geographic periphery are being tricked into illegal and often abusive “marriages” by unscrupulous brokerage networks.

Each year, deceptive or coercive brokers transport thousands of women from Asian and African countries to China, where they are subjected to sex trafficking, living as a concubine, forced childbearing, and forced labour in domestic servitude under the false pretence of marriage.

02:13

The Vietnamese daughters sold into China’s booming ‘buy-a-bride’ trade

Through corrupt immigration channels, unscrupulous brokers facilitate marriages with prospective “husbands”, who pay thousands of dollars to recruit and transport women and girls. Those who escape these situations often leave their children behind.