Footballers to help tackle slave trade

This trafficking problem is one of the biggest obstacles to Vietnam’s development.

Mimi Vu

LONDON: An antislavery charity is looking for Premier League footballers to front a campaign to prevent human trafficking, which it says is destroying Vietnam’s future.

Large numbers of Vietnamese are trafficked abroad every year, predominantly within Asia but also further afield, risking enslavement in nail bars, cannabis farms, domestic servitude or prostitution.

“This trafficking problem is one of the biggest obstacles to Vietnam’s development,” said Mimi Vu, advocacy director of Pacific Links Foundation.

“The future of Vietnam is its young people, and we are losing our future.”

Vu said trafficking was draining Vietnam of workers, and leaving a generation of children to grow up without parents, which new research from China indicated causes longterm damage.

“In Vietnam, they’re obsessed with the Premier League,” she said.

“The idea of the campaign is to say, ‘Who’s your home team? It’s your family, so stay with your family.’”

Vu said Vietnamese pay smugglers up to US$30,000 (RM124,110) to get to Britain, lured by fake promises of lucrative jobs.

“They take decisions based on faulty information and the consequences are broken families, enslavement, physical violence, rape and jail,” she said during a trip here.

“The dream they have been told again and again is that the UK is the promised land. We need to dispel that myth.”

There are no figures for the numbers of Vietnamese trafficked each year, but Vietnam is one of the top source countries for victims of modern slavery in Britain.

The football campaign is partfunded by a new British initiative to tackle trafficking in highrisk countries.

Britain’s antislavery tsar Kevin Hyland recommended this month that the government develop trafficking prevention programmes in Vietnam, and boost support for survivors returning from Britain, particularly boys and men.

Vu said current support packages for returnees – mainly women – were inadequate, increasing the risk that many would leave again or become traffickers themselves. — Reuters