Young people taken to UK are exploited in transit through Europe as governments ‘pass the buck’ on protection

Thousands of children trafficked from Vietnam to the UK are being abused and exploited in transit through Europe because governments are “passing the buck” on their protection, research has found.

Victims are typically trafficked through eight countries before arriving in the UK, and at each point are vulnerable to labour and sexual exploitation. Yet governments routinely view Vietnamese children as the responsibility of other states, according to a report published on Thursday by Anti-Slavery International, the Pacific Links Foundation and Every Child Protected Against Trafficking UK (Ecpat UK).

As a result, Vietnamese children across Europe are not identified as victims, unable to access protection from their traffickers and vulnerable to further exploitation and abuse, said Debbie Beadle, of Ecpat UK.

“What we found from our research is that governments see these children are passing through their countries to get to western Europe and the UK, so they act like it’s not their problem and they can just pass the buck,” said Beadle.

“They’re not identifying trafficking victims and even NGOs are not seeing it as an issue. Victims are being arrested and seen as criminals rather than victims of trafficking. Under international law, states have a duty to protect children from trafficking and exploitation. It’s simply not acceptable for states to regard trafficked Vietnamese children as another country’s problem.”

Vietnamese nationals are routinely listed as among the top three most commonly referred nationalities of potential victims of human trafficking. From 2009 to 2018, 3,187 Vietnamese children and adults were identified as trafficking victims by the government’s national referral mechanism (NRM). But the number of Vietnamese victims is likely to be far higher, say activists.

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Poverty at home, climate change and lack of political freedoms – together with a lack of safe, legal migration routes – make children vulnerable to traffickers and risky job offers abroad, according to the report. Boys comprise the majority of the Vietnamese children trafficked abroad, with forced labour in sweat shops, cannabis cultivation or nail bars the most common exploitation.

The report, based on 18 months of research with law enforcement, NGOs, government officials and members of the Vietnamese community across Europe, found that Vietnamese children are routinely trafficked by plane from Vietnam to Russia, then overland through Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands and France. In some cases, children are forced to enter EU countries on foot through woodland to escape the eyes of the authorities; in others they are driven by car or lorry, then loaded on to ferries.

Roughly 50,000 Russian tourist visas are issued to Vietnamese people every year, Beadle added, a figure so high that she estimates a large proportion of the visas are being used to traffic people.

Whatever the circumstances, said Mimi Vu, of the Pacific Links Foundation, governments all along the way are collectively failing to tackle the issue because they have not invested in simple resources that would yield insight into the issue – such as police officers or social workers who speak Vietnamese.

“One of the things we saw in the countries we did research in was that in talks with police and government and NGOs, they all say, ‘The Vietnamese community is a hard one to crack and we don’t know what’s going on there,’” said Vu.

“All these countries have large Vietnamese populations but haven’t done any large-scale outreach to recruit social workers or government officials or investigators or have their non-Vietnamese staff learn the language. There’s no easy solution, because you can’t overnight grow a core of Vietnamese-speaking NGO workers or police, but this isn’t going to stop. These gangs operate under everyone’s noses in plain sight and so far there’s no incentive for them to stop.”

Debt bondage is a huge issue with Vietnamese children trafficked to Europe, the report claims, as debts regularly amount anywhere from $10,000 (£7,800) to $40,000. Traffickers then keep track of any “interest” owed on the debts, often in tandem with threats of violence directed at the child or the child’s family.

But authorities often fail to identify victims of trafficking and treat them as criminals or irregular migrants instead, said Beadle.

“There’s no statutory or mandatory training for frontline professionals, so you can’t guarantee a victim-centred response.” She said this meant that they could end up in a youth offenders’ institute or, if they were misidentified as an adult, in adult detention centres or prisons, and then could potentially be deported.

“The impact on that child being imprisoned is huge because if their first contact [with authority] is being arrested and imprisoned, it doesn’t help them to come forward or to explain their story.”

Dung*, a Vietnamese member of Ecpat UK’s youth group for victims of trafficking, was trafficked from Vietnam to China, then to Europe. All along the way, authorities failed to identify her as a victim or help her get justice.

“I was a child who was taken across Europe by people I was scared of,” she said. “In France, the police didn’t help me and my traffickers found me again. When in the UK, I was treated like a criminal. One thing I would say to the people in Europe is, if it happened to your children, you wouldn’t ignore it. One thing I would say to the UK government is, why are the victims the ones you treat like criminals?”

*Some names have been changed.