Not who you expect

Close your eyes and conjure an image: A victim of human trafficking.

Who do you see?

Almost certainly, it’s not Thinh.

Thinh is a 32-year old man. He has a wife and two young children, all living together with his parents in a large town in southern Vietnam.

Throughout his life, Thinh has had his ups and downs but usually manages to land on his feet. He’s worked in construction and for a while even had his own small business, before it went bust and left him with a small debt.

So when a friend-of-a-friend offered him a chance to make some real money, he was tempted. All he had to do was go to Cambodia for a few months and manage a building site. The money was good because the work was a bit risky – he wouldn’t have a work permit or legal status, but the company was desperate for good workers so they were willing to pay a premium. Thinh saw a chance to get his business debt over and done with quickly.

He made the choice knowing these risks. He knew he was breaking the law.

Trafficked

What he didn’t know was that there was actually no construction job at all. He had been duped into working for a criminal gang that runs fraud schemes online.

Once in Cambodia, he was locked into a massive compound along with hundreds of others. When he tried to turn back, his resistance was immediately met with violence in the form of an electric cattle prod to his ribs.

It was more than 8 months before Thinh had an opportunity to escape. Now that he’s home in Vietnam, he shares little about what he saw and experienced, but when he does speak he trembles with terror.

Shame

To his family and neighbors, Thinh’s absence of 8 months is a mystery. They don’t understand why he returned empty handed after working in a job that should have been lucrative.

If he was really in danger, why didn’t he just refuse to work? Why not escape? After all, he’s a strong man and knows how to defend himself.

Even in his own eyes, Thinh finds it hard to see himself as a victim. Because he, too – just like all of us – thinks of human trafficking as something that happens to people who are weak, helpless, feminine. And he’s none of those things.

He also knows that he broke the law when he crossed into Cambodia without the proper paperwork. To make matters worse: once he was there, he worked in an illegal industry, where profit is made by deception.

Thinh doesn’t expect sympathy and he certainly doesn’t extend any to himself.

Researchers use the phrase “The perfect victim” to describe the profile of a person who is seen as deserving of support after the experience of exploitation. Thinh does not fit that profile.

Deserving

We find it easy to recognise a victim when the story is black-and-white: A child taken from her family. Or a young woman tricked by a stranger.

Those people certainly deserve our sympathy.

But trafficking doesn’t only happen to people like that.

Sometimes it happens to men. To people who knowingly take risks. To people who break the law.

And when that happens, many of us stop seeing the exploitation and start looking for fault.

A recent study examined the experience of people trafficked into online scam compounds in Southeast Asia. One of their findings was that many survivors struggle to be recognised as victims at all.

Not because they weren’t exploited, but because they don’t match our expectations of what a victim should look like.

You can find the full study here – it’s written by a team that includes my colleagues at Blue Dragon.

The paper makes a strong case for what we should already know: Human trafficking does not only happen to perfect victims.

It happens to people who are desperate, take chances, and trust the wrong person.

People like Thinh.

If our compassion extends only to those who never made a mistake, we will overlook many of the people who need it most.

Because the truth is that traffickers do not go looking for perfect victims.

They look for human beings.

Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation is working towards a world where we are all free from exploitation and slavery.