Girls smuggled into China and sold as child brides

The villages along the Vietnamese-Chinese border are a hunting ground for human traffickers. 

Girls as young as 13 say they are tricked or drugged, then spirited across the porous border by boat, motorbike or car. 

Young Vietnamese women are valuable commodities in China, where the one-child policy and long-standing preference for sons has heavily skewed the gender ratio.

To put it simply, Chinese men are hungry for brides.

"It costs a very huge amount of money for normal Chinese man to get married to a Chinese woman," explained Ha Thi Van Khanh, national project coordinator for the U.N.'s anti-trafficking organization in Vietnam. Traditionally, Chinese men wishing to marry local women are expected to pay for an elaborate banquet and to have purchased a new home to live in after the wedding. "This is why they try to import women from neighboring countries, including Vietnam."

Diep Vuong started the Pacific Links Foundation to combat trafficking in Vietnam. She says that Vietnamese brides can sell for upwards of $3,000 to the end buyer and that they are often considered desirable because of cultural similarities to the Chinese.

Nguyen was just 16 when a friend's boyfriend drugged her and smuggled her into China. She tried to resist a forced marriage. For three months, she refused, even though her traffickers beat her, withheld food and threatened to kill her, she says. Finally, she relented. She says her husband was kind to her, but she never stopped missing her family in Vietnam.

"My desire to go home was indescribable," Nguyen said. "I agreed to marry the man but I could not stay with a stranger without any feelings for him."

When her mother-in-law realized Lan was never going to warm to the marriage, the family returned her to the traffickers. They got their money back, Nguyen says, after which she was forced into a second marriage.