Exploitation for forced marriage, organ trafficking rife in Asia Pacific

1 Comment read Features, Gender
A trafficked survivor reunites with family in Vietnam. Photo Supplied by Blue Dragon Children's Foundation


The writer won the 2020 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Best Print Report Award for this story

The writer’s interview on SBS Radio Hindi Service

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 18 May 2020 (IPS): A single mother, Mai (name changed) had the responsibility of providing for her young son and grandparents, who had brought her up in a poor rural province in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. While she was looking for employment, somebody approached her on social media with an offer of a high-paying job in China. When she arrived in China, she was sold to a man for ‘marriage’.

For two months, Mai suffered violence and beatings from her `husband’, who kept her locked in the house. When she tried to fight back, the ‘husband’ sold her to another man seeking a wife. She was forced to have sex as the family wanted a child. When she became pregnant, she was given some freedom and allowed to work in a nearby shoe factory. Desperate to escape this forced marriage and slavery, she managed to connect online with a Vietnamese man, who referred her to Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, an Australian charity working in Vietnam.

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Modern Slavery in Asia Pacific fuelled by poverty, migration & weak governance

0 Comments read Environment & Development, Features, Migration

The writer won the 2020 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Best Print Report Award for this story

The writer’s interview on SBS Radio Hindi Service

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 15.05.2020 (IPS): Aged 17, Moe Turaga was saddled with the responsibility of providing for his mother and young siblings when a family member approached him with the promise of a job and education in Australia. Dreaming of a bright future for himself and his family, he seized the opportunity and left the protective confines of his home in Fiji, only to find himself trapped in modern slavery on a remote agriculture farm in the state of Victoria.

Turaga was one of 12 cousins, forced to work long hours in abysmal conditions. He told IPS, “We had implicit faith in this man as he was family and a church minister. We kept loyal for years because we were told that our wages were being used to feed our family and send our siblings to school. It was 1988, we didn’t have mobiles or access to social media. All our identity documents had been confiscated by this man so we were completely isolated.”

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Indonesia faces new tsunami risks

0 Comments read Environment & Development

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 29.04.2020 (SciDev.Net): Many coastal communities in the Indonesian archipelago, including the proposed site of the new capital on the island of Borneo, could be at potential tsunami risk from submarine landslides, according to a study published by the Geological Society of London.

Tsunamis, whether caused by earthquakes, volcanoes or submarine landslides, pose a specific risk to the sustainability and resilience of coastal communities. They claim thousands of lives, damage to property and cause widespread destruction to infrastructure. South-East Asia is particularly prone to tsunamis due to its seismically active geology.

A British-Indonesian team of researchers which carried out the study, published this month (April) in the Submarine Mass Movements and their Consequences, has identified a number of ancient submarine landslides off the east coast of Kalimantan in the Makassar Strait, between the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi.
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