WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION, MARRIAGE AND TRAFFICKING…
undertaken with those women. Afterwards, each woman was asked to
approach three other women they knew who had been trafficked. The
initial set of respondents was then trained to serve as interviewers for
the second set of women. This method facilitated the identification of
cases and put women more at ease during the interview process. This
respondent-driven sampling method allowed the identification of a
total of 213 women who were locally defined as having been trafficked
to China at some point in their lives. The local authorities’ definition
encompassed any migration process within which there was deception
or abuse in the destination and reason for migration. Sometimes,
however, women were identified as such more based on gossips than
on knowledge of the women’s experiences. Some women, therefore,
disagreed with this label in describing their trajectory.
In addition to the survey, semi-structured in-depth interviews and
focus group discussions (FGD) were also conducted. The study involved
a total of 30 semi-structured interviews and eight focus group
discussions. The interviewees and informants comprised of trafficking
victims, families of victims and other local people as well as cadres of
the local authorities and of mass organizations. The semi-structured indepth
interviews and FGD aimed to discover individual, community,
and policy factors that make people vulnerable to trafficking. It also
provided rich information on migration or traffic as an experience and
a process. The study participants’ characteristics are described below:
Age: The mean and median ages of the 213 trafficked women (at
the time of their being trafficked) are 25.3 and 24.0 respectively; with
the age distribution skewed towards group age 30 or less (accounting
for 78.1 percent of the total). Contrary to the common belief that
trafficked women are of young ages, the data collected for this study
(n=213) show that they can be of old ages as well: the range of their
ages by the time of their departure is from as young as 12 to as old as
50, and the time span of the trafficking from as early as 1984 and as
late as 2004, a few months before the study (March 2005). Another
important finding is that there is a relatively high number of women
who were trafficked when they were younger than 18, accounting for
11.2 percent of the sample. If we also include those aged 18 as children,
as is done in most of the literature on this issue, then the figure
jumps up to 20.4 percent. Indeed, the largest age group consists of
women who are between 18 and 24 years old, accounting for 40.3
percent.
Ethnicity and religion: Almost all of the studied women (96.2 percent)
are Viet (Kinh), the dominant ethnic group in Vietnam. Only
eight women are of other ethnic groups (3.7 percent). Research sug-
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