Local organizations raise funds, awareness of human trafficking overseas
Date Posted: 2/12/2006

ORANGE, Calif. — The stories are heartbreaking.

There’s the 19-year-old who suffers from schizophrenia because she had been locked in a room with her mentally disabled husband, forced to watch pornography.

A mother who was raped by her boss gave birth to a child she had to abandon because, as a married woman, she could not take her baby back to Việt Nam.

A group of military men who toiled at a factory for nearly nothing, after work went to a small, dirty room where they hung a red flag with a single yellow star as a reminder that they were human, proudly from Việt Nam, and not animals as they had been treated.

The numbers, too, are staggering.

Consider that there are 100,000 Vietnamese brides in Taiwan, looking for a better life but not necessarily getting it, along with 95,000 Vietnamese laborers, most unsuccessful in making a living wage.

“Unfortunately, it’s modern day slavery through legal means,” said Tammy Trần, founder of the Vietnamese Alliance to Combat Trafficking. “We need to lobby in the U.S. to bring attention to what’s going on overseas.”

And to build attention takes two things: a show of support and money to promote that support.

On Saturday, the Vietnamese Professionals Society of Southern California held its first benefit gala to raise funds for VietACT, as Trần’s group is known, to boost awareness of human trafficking and labor exploitation. The night started with a silent artwork auction for the victims and ended with dinner and speakers’ accounts of what they encountered overseas.

According to VietACT, many of the brides and laborers in Taiwan end up with abusive employers. One notorious case became known as the Tainan rape, where an employment agency run by a father and son abused and violated more than 100 Vietnamese women who were looking for work. The crisis surfaced when Father Nguyễn Văn Hùng, a priest from Australia, received a letter from one of the victims.

“Then the phone calls came from even more women and we learned that there were dozens of others,” he said.

It was through his work and an underground network of priests in Taiwan that almost 2,000 cases were made public, said Xuyến Đông-Matsuda, a licensed psychotherapist with the Orange County Health Care Agency in Southern California. She traveled to Taiwan in August to provide mental-health services at the three shelters, and described the three types of victims she saw.

“You have the Vietnamese brides who want a better life with their Taiwanese husbands, the female laborers who are exploited and many times sexually victimized, as well as the men who go into the mountains and work without compensation,” she said.

Through VPS newsletters and the evening’s presenters, attendees learned of a young Vietnamese bride whose husband held her down as his brother raped her, women and men with work-related injuries that were never paid for, and the hundreds of laborers who were threatened to keep their mouths shut about the abuse. It was these types of situations, specifically NBC’s “Dateline” airing “Kids for Sale”, that prompted Trần to start VietACT.

“Evil triumphs when good doesn’t do anything,” said Trần, an aide to Orange County Supervisor Lou Correa.

Through the nonprofit’s collaboration with Father Hùng’s group, the Vietnamese Migrant Workers Office in Taiwan, the priest and four other employees have been able to maintain awareness of human trafficking, provide financial resources to the victims, as well as mental health and legal services.

Currently there are 19 victims at the three Taiwanese shelters VietACT supports. “Tonight’s funds will be going to the upkeep of the office and shelters, as well as providing the assistance these victims need,” said Father Hùng. “My goals are to raise and maintain awareness as well as fund our efforts in Taiwan. The office is very small, and even though we have accomplished a lot, there is still more work to be done.”

Although human trafficking occurs in other parts of the world, VietACT’s goal is to focus on its Vietnamese brethren and then spread out from there.

“It doesn’t matter who you are,” Father Hùng said. “It isn’t an American problem, or a Vietnamese problem, or a Catholic problem. It’s a human problem, a human rights problem.”