Man arrested for selling teenage girl to China

Cut Van Ut, 32, of Tuong Duong District faces charges of child trafficking.

According to investigators, he was hired by a Vietnamese woman living in China, identified only by her given name, Van, to traffic women to her.

For every woman he sent, Ut was to be paid VND5 million ($216.24).

In April last year he met a 14-year-old ethnic Khmu girl, whose identity has not been disclosed to protect her, in a remote commune in the central province's Ky Son District.

She had dropped out of school.

Ut told her he had contacts and could get her a job with decent wages in southern Vietnam. The girl believed him and agreed to leave home with him.

He then sent her straight to Van in China, and she sold her to a Chinese family for VND140 million for marriage to a man in that family.

A year later the girl was rescued with help from the Blue Dragon Children's Foundation, a Hanoi-based nonprofit that works to rescue Vietnamese women and girls trafficked to China for the sex trade and forced labor.

The girl was brought back to Vietnam early this month and sent to a Covid-19 quarantine facility before being reunited with her family on Thursday.

A 14-year-old girl (L) who was trafficked to China reunites with her family on December 24, 2020. Photo by the news portal of Nghe An Province.

From her testimony, the police tracked down and arrested Ut.

They have expanded their investigation to the human trafficking ring that Ut and Van work for.

Vietnam recorded over 3,400 cases of human trafficking between 2013 and 2019, with over 90 percent of the victims being women, children and ethnic minorities, according to the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs.

Hundreds of thousands of women from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar have been trafficked to China to marry local men, activists say. Some end up happily married, but many others suffer violence and forced labor.