Lao Cai (Vietnam) (AFP) - When Kiab turned 16, her brother offered to take her to a celebration in a tourist city in northern Vietnam. Instead, he sold her into a Chinese family as a woman.
The ethnic Hmong teenager spent nearly a month in China until she surely could escape her new partner, seek support from local police and go back to Vietnam.
"My brother is no more an individual within my eyes -- he bought his own cousin to China," the name of Kiab, whose, told AFP in a refuge for trafficking victims inside the Vietnamese bordertown Lao Cai.
Weak women in countries near China -- not simply Vietnam but additionally North Korea, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar -- are being forced into relationships in the territory of the main one-child policy, experts say.
As a result millions of men currently cannot find Chinese women -- a key driver of trafficking, in accordance with rights groups.
China suffers from one of the worst gender imbalances on the planet as people prefer male children.
The Lao Cai shelter currently houses several females from various ethnic minority groups. All state these were deceived by relatives, friends or men and sold to Asian men as women.
"I'd seen alot about trafficking. But I could not imagine it'd eventually me," Kiab said.
As trafficking is run by illegal gangs along with the areas involved are inadequate and distant, formal data is patchy and probably underestimates the scale of the problem, experts say.
But rights workers across Southeast Asia say they are witnessing "systematic" trafficking of women into China for forced marriages.
- Tricked and sold -
Vietnamese girls are sold to brothels or for up to $5,000 as brides, said Michael Brosowski, President and creator of Blue Dragon Kid's Basis, that has saved 71 trafficked women from China since 2007.
" girls are fooled by persons offering jobs, or appearing as men. The individuals do a lack of human concern and this very deliberately, as well as for nothing other than greed," he added.
It's likely that most of the girls end-up working in brothels, but as a result of stigma of being a sex-worker they'll often record these were forced into marriage.
"It is mostly women who live in isolated and mountainous regions that are being trafficked throughout the boundary, since there is no data for people," said 18-year old Lang, from your Tay ethnic minority, who stepped over the frontier illegally and was sold into a Chinese family with a friend.
Communist neighbours Vietnam and China reveal a mountainous, remote boundary extending 350 kilometres, 1, marked mainly from the Nam Thi water and rife with smuggling of products of sorts: fruit, live poultry and women.
In northern Vietnam, trafficking has become so intense that areas say they are residing in fear.
"I worry so much about this, as do most of the parents within the communities, but it has happened to a lot of girls currently," said Phan Missouri May, a community elder in the Red Dao ethnic minority group.
"I have one daughter. She is already committed, but I'm concerned about my daughter. We tell her never to speak around the telephone or trust anyone, and always ask where she's planning."
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"There's nothing at home for these women, not even enough food to eat," said manager Nguyen Tuong Long, referring to the terrible poverty that is another key driver.The housing in Lao Cai has helped scores of female subjects and opened this year.
Activists trying to combat trafficking in Vietnam said regulators and authorities take the problem " very seriously ".
- 'Painful experience' -
May Na, from the Hmong ethnic group, was 13 when her dad took her throughout the line and pushed her to marry a Chinese man.
"I could not accept it. They left me at home and the wall climbed within and ran away. I was wandering for higher than a day, lost, resting in the streets, crying," she said.
Eventually, Na wound up at a police station, but since she spoke Chinese nor Vietnamese -- only her local Hmong -- it got authorities monthly return her to Vietnam and to figure out what had happened.
Now 16, Na -- the oldest of five kids -- is studying Vietnamese in the Lao Cai centre. Her uncle has been charged, she said, but she has chosen to not come back to her own family.
"I had been so sad once I was in China. It was an agonizing experience for me," she said.
The government says it's released education programmes in rural areas, close to the boundary, caution girls never to trust outsiders.
Long, the center manager, says he thinks the number of cases is falling.
Anti-trafficking organizations in Vietnam claim it is difficult to warn ladies of the challenges when it's often a family member or friend performing the deception.
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