Exploitation for forced marriage, organ trafficking rife in Asia Pacific

18/05/2020 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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Nukes Are Illegal – But Still Around

11/03/2012 0 Comments read Nuclear Disarmament

Junko Morimoto. Photo Credit: ICAN Australia

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 11.03.2012 (InDepth News Analysis -IDN): Junko Morimoto was 13 years old when the United States of America dropped the first atomic bomb on her hometown of Hiroshima. She was only 1700 metres away from the hypocentre and if it weren’t for a stomach bug that confined her to home, she would have been amongst the 360 students who died at her city center school on August 6, 1945.

Morimoto has an inoperable brain tumour affecting her balance. Nearly seven decades after the nuclear bombs exploded, Japanese people are still living each day with the terrible aftermath of the radiation on the environment and their health, with genetic damage passing to future generations.

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Australian Red Cross campaigns to Make Nuclear Weapons the Target

06/09/2011 0 Comments read Nuclear Disarmament

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 06.09.2011 (InDepth News Analysis – IDN): It was 7am on a fateful day in 1953, 10-year-old Yami Lester and a group of Aboriginal children were playing with a toy truck, when they heard a loud bang intercepted with several small bangs as the ground beneath their small feet shook.

“We saw a shiny black cloud coming from the south, moving above and through the trees, which spread across 70 miles. We shut our eyes as they began to burn. In the days that followed, about 50 Yankunytjatjara people in Walatina began to complain of skin rashes, sore eyes, vomiting, diarrhoea and coughing. There was no treatment on the cattle station. The closest health clinic was hundreds of miles away and we had no transport,” says Yami Lester, who was living160 km from Emu Junction in South Australia, the site of the first nuclear test on mainland Australia.

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