Vietnamese Children Trafficked for Forced Labor to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Exit, Return, and Reintegration

Abstract

This chapter explores issues of children’s agency and participation in antitrafficking interventions with children trafficked for exploitative labor in Vietnam. In particular, the chapter focuses on the ways children leave labor trafficking situations through outside interventions in the form of rescue and its associated rehabilitation and reintegration programs offered to rescue victims. The chapter aims to contribute to recent interventions on children/ youth and labor migration/trafficking, which have criticized on several grounds the use of a trafficking framework to understand children’s experiences and to develop interventions for them. The findings of this study reveal that the specificities of the local context, the countertrafficking actors involved, and the sector in which trafficking takes place are all important to consider in evaluating the salience of rescue-centered approaches in countertrafficking and children’s agency in these processes. From a policy perspective, it is suggested here that a greater degree of attention be paid to modes and motivations of exiting work for migrant child laborers, which will balance the current emphasis on motivations and arrangements in migrating for work. It is further suggested that policy makers, as well as the scholarly community, look to models of child participation in trafficking interventions, which demonstrate that antitrafficking measures do not always deny agency to child migrants.