A 16-year-old Cambodian girl who said she was tricked by job brokers, sold to a Chinese man who held her against her will in Zhejiang province arrived back in Cambodia on Wednesday.
"I am releasing this video to show that I have arrived in Cambodia safely," said the girl, whose name Radio Free Asia is withholding because she is a minor, in a short video she posted on Facebook.
In the video recorded at Phnom Penh International Airport, she thanked Cambodian President Hun Manet, the Cambodian consul general in Shanghai and police who helped facilitate her return.
The trafficking of Cambodian girls and women to China as brides has increased in recent years, according to Human Right Watch's 2024 World Report, an annual review of human rights practices and trends around the globe.
Brokers have increasingly targeted teenagers as brides, the report said. Many are tricked or forced into marriages with Chinese men, who may subject them to abuse and sexual slavery, hold them prisoner, force them to perform labor and pressure them to have babies, the report said.
Following the girl’s return, her mother told RFA that her daughter quit school in early 2023 to work in a factory to help the family financially, but then she lost contact with her. She urged other parents to beware of human trafficking schemes.
“Since I have lost my child, I have lost my mind,” she said.
Girl posted video seeking help
The rescue operation began when Chinese police went to the man's home in Zhejiang province on March 10 after the girl posted a video and a written message on Facebook seeking help from Cambodian authorities, RFA reported earlier.
Cambodia’s consul general in Shanghai informed police and accompanied authorities to the home.
The girl, from eastern Tbong Khmum province, cooperated with Chinese investigators and was kept in a safe place under the care of consulate officials.
She later told RFA via Facebook Messenger that the man regularly beat and insulted her, locked her in a room at times, and forced her to have sex to try to impregnate her.
Chum Sounry, spokesman for Cambodia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, told RFA via the Telegram instant-messaging service on Wednesday that authorities sent the girl to Hagar International, a Swiss-based global humanitarian NGO founded in Cambodia in 1994 that assists people who have escaped sexual slavery and human trafficking.
The spokesman discouraged other Cambodians from seeking employment overseas where they could be sold as brides.
In August 2023, brokers told the girl and three of her friends that they could work at a market in China and earn US$700 a month — about four times the average monthly earnings in Cambodia.
The brokers drove the girls from Phnom Penh, through Vietnam and into China, where they were put in a room with other Cambodian and Vietnamese girls and women, the girl previously said.
The Chinese man paid money for her, while her friends were sold separately.
Moeun Tola, executive director of the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, said authorities have been able to rescue many Cambodians trafficked to China because they spoke out about their predicaments via social media or other means.
He urged the government to provide trafficking victims with job training so they do not leave Cambodia again and risk revictimization.
Translated by Yun Samean for RFA Khmer. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.