Why didn't you just run away?That was a question an audience member, a man, posed to former sex trafficking victim Maria Suarez who spoke last fall in Costa Mesa. It's a question many wonder when they hear of cases where trafficking victims live openly in our midst.
Caroline Le talks to students in an English class she taught at a Taiwan shelter for human trafficking victims.
In Suarez's case, the answer was this: She was held captive for five years in the home of an Azusa man, lured by the promise of a house cleaning job. She came in contact with neighbors and, later, with fellow employees when her captor allowed her to work in a factory. Still, she never ran away.
That dynamic – a victim who stays in a horrific situation even when escape seems possible – is often at play for trafficking victims, whether they're forced to work in a factory in Taiwan or at a brothel in Orange County.
Caroline Le of Garden Grove wanted to know why.
The answers she learned boiled down to this: It's complicated.
About two years ago – while working on her master's degree in global and international studies at UC Santa Barbara – Le flew to Taiwan to intern at a shelter for human trafficking victims. The internship had been created by the Orange County-based Vietnamese Alliance to Combat Trafficking (VietACT) in partnership with a board member, Peter Nguyen Van Hung, who runs the shelter.
To help the women and men she met at the shelter, Le first needed to connect with them as people. They watched soap operas together, played volleyball, made paper lanterns. She taught some of them a little English and how to dance the cha-cha.
But Le went a step further.
With Nguyen Van Hung's blessing, she studied case files and interviewed dozens of victims.
The stories they shared were harrowing. Beyond the forced sex and forced slave labor, the victims often were treated as less-than-human. Several factory workers told Le they were forced to live in a storage container with no ventilation, even during the blistering summer months.
Another trafficking victim, a domestic worker, told Le that she worked nonstop despite suffering from kidney problems. Her diet was primarily the family's table scraps, which usually meant fish bones, something that worsened her condition.
The shelter where Le was working as an intern was primarily for Vietnamese victims, and many who spoke with Le said they came from Vietnam's most impoverished areas. They'd been lured to other parts of Asia by promises of comparatively high-paying jobs in residential homes, factories and nursing homes. What they got instead was debt – their wages often were taken to pay the exorbitant costs charged for passage into Taiwan, sometimes as much as $8,000 (U.S.).
"They have this huge debt on their shoulders that's building interest as the days go by," says Le, 25, who is Vietnamese American and spent more than four months in Taiwan. "It's just a horrible situation for them."
In her master's thesis, Le focused on the work of so-called "employment" brokers – the people who bring the victims into Taiwan. The brokers, Le says, are key players in a complex system that she describes as "institutionalized human trafficking."
"It's... human trafficking that's disguised as an employment agency," says Le, whose thesis was approved last month and she hopes to share it with the Taiwanese government.
Still, the answer to the question – why don't victims just run away – isn't simple.
Another Orange County resident who worked as an intern at the Taiwanese shelter, Vanessa Nguyen of Anaheim, suggests the question itself isn't totally fair.
"It's easy for people who have lived in a place with democracy and freedoms... to be equipped with the ability to choose right from wrong, or to choose to do something. But these women, they had no choice in anything," Nguyen says.
"The No. 1 thing I learned is that you can't be judgmental. These women are faced with the toughest decisions of their lives."
Running away or escaping is rarely an option. Not when you have a family to feed, a mortgage to pay, or your life on the line. That's why VietACT's goal is to raise the "drum beat" on human trafficking, so the world doesn't forget that sometimes people don't have a choice.
Contact the writer: at ycabrera@ocregister.com or 714-796-3649 or http://twitter.com/Ycabreraocr. For more information on VietACT go to www.vietact.org
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