18 children rescued from slavery
February 3, 2026
In the final week of January, Blue Dragon rescued 18 Vietnamese children from slavery.
Six of these are girls and boys who were trafficked to Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand.
This includes a 14-year-old girl who was being held in a Cambodian scamming compound where she was repeatedly sexually abused; and a 17-year-old girl who was trafficked to a brothel in the Thailand–Cambodia border area.
The youngest is a 13-year-old boy who was forced to work in an online scamming operation.
We also assisted authorities to find and rescue 12 girls aged 14 to 17 who were sold to a karaoke bar in northern Vietnam where they were forced to do sex work.
One of the group of 12 girls rescued being reunited with their family.
Blue Dragon regularly responds to calls for help from people in slavery and their family members. In conducting rescue operations, we do not discriminate on age – we will rescue a person of any age – but children are always our highest priority.
Trafficking into these compounds of children and adults alike is unprecedented in scale.
Being trafficked into these scam centres and the adjacent forced sex work industry is the most prominent human trafficking threat for people from Vietnam and other nationalities in the region.
Of the almost 2,000 people Blue Dragon has rescued from slavery, more than 650 are from the forced scamming industry, all since 2022. While the majority of victims are adults, nearly 10% are underage. Their targeting of children for forced labour and sex work distinguishes the violent nature of the criminals behind them and highlights the urgency to close them all down.
While Blue Dragon continues to rescue people who have been trafficked into slavery, we are ramping our interventions to prevent human trafficking before it happens.
Our community-based model is showing promising results as we ramp up across Vietnam with the aim of reaching every vulnerable community member by 2032.
Blue Dragon is working every day toward our vision of a world where every child is safe from trafficking and exploitation.
