Vietnamese women were trafficked to the P.R.C., Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea via fraudulent or misrepresented marriages for commercial exploitation or forced labor.
Vietnam was also a source country for men and women who migrate willingly and legally for work in the construction, fishing, or manufacturing sectors in Malaysia, Taiwan, P.R.C., Thailand, and the Middle East but subsequently face conditions of forced labor or debt bondage.
Vietnam was a destination country for Cambodian children trafficked to urban centers for forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation.
Vietnam was increasingly a destination for child sex tourism, with perpetrators from Japan, the Republic of Korea, the P.R.C., Taiwan, the UK, Australia, Europe, and the U.S.
Citizens, primarily women and girls, from many ethnic groups in Vietnam and foreigners have been sex trafficked into other countries in Asia and cases of even different continents.
In April 2007 in Ho Chi Minh City, police disrupted a Korean trafficking ring that fraudulently recruited Vietnamese for marriages, rescuing 118 women.
In July, the Ho Chi Minh People’s Court convicted six Vietnamese with sentences ranging from 5–12 years for trafficking 126 women to Malaysia under the guise of a matchmaking agency.
The government still has no formal system of identifying victims of any type of trafficking, but the Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU) and international organizations, including International Organization for Migration (IOM) and UNICEF, continue training the Border Guard Command and local Vietnamese authorities to identify, process, and treat victims.
There were reports in February 2008 of a group of over 200 Vietnamese men and women recruited by Vietnamese state-run labor agencies for work in apparel factories in Jordan, who were allegedly subjected to conditions of fraudulent recruitment, debt bondage, unlawful confiscation of travel documents, confinement, and manipulation of employment terms for the purpose of forced labor at their worksite.
Some reports stated that the workers faced threats of retaliation by Vietnamese government officials and employment agency representatives if they did not return to work.
In March 2007, the VWU opened the national “Center for Women and Development” in Hanoi to provide shelter, counseling, financial and vocational support to sex trafficking and domestic violence victims.
The Ministry of Labor, Invalids, and Social Affairs (MOLISA) reported that 422 women and child victims of sex trafficking were repatriated.
International organizations and NGOs continued collaboration with the government to provide training and technical assistance to various ministry officials as well as partnering in public awareness campaigns.