* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
This story was written by Simina Mistreanu, a participant on a Reporting Trafficking and Slavery course held by Thomson Reuters Foundation in parallel with the foundation’s Trust Women Conference. Simina is a Romanian journalist working with journalism non-profit Media DoR Association.
LONDON - Chau Thi Minh Dinh is always on call. Her patients often phone her at midnight or stop by to see her. She chats to them on Facebook and spends her weekends visiting them.
Thi Minh Dinh is one of a small number of psychologists working in Vietnam with survivors of human trafficking. Most of her clients are trafficked from Vietnam into China and forced into sex work. Once freed, they need therapy to recover from trauma and many require around-the-clock support.
“We work with our hearts – not just our voices and our minds – because (survivors) are sensitive,” Thi Minh Dinh said in an interview on the sidelines of the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Trust Women Conference in London. “If they know you just work because it’s your job, they’ll recognise this and they won’t open up.”
Trust is an essential part of the healing process. Survivors find it difficult to trust anyone after being tricked into slavery by traffickers.
“The first step is to rebuild that trust. You can’t reject them. You can’t say, ‘It’s midnight, so maybe tomorrow we will talk.’ They would never call you back,” said Thi Minh Dinh, who works with Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, an Australian non-profit based in Hanoi.
The foundation has rescued 353 children since 2005 and provides education, health care and shelter for homeless, abused or impoverished children, as well as assistance to trafficked and enslaved children and sex workers.
Helping survivors reintegrate into society is an ongoing job.
One of Thi Minh Dinh’s patients has returned to her former life – she now lives alone and attends college – but the psychologist knows that every time the woman feels under pressure, such as during an exam or after a breakup, the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder will return.
People suffering from PTSD need continual support, especially at night, when they often experience nightmares, flashbacks or other symptoms, which might recur for years after the traumatic event, she said.
Thi Minh Dinh teaches her patients techniques to cope with these symptoms on their own, but she makes it clear she is available to them all the time.
“We can’t draw a boundary with survivors, especially survivors of human trafficking,” she said. “We can’t say, ‘This time I couldn’t talk to you because we don’t have a person available.’”
This means Thi Minh Dinh’s professional load often spills into her personal life. She is the only psychologist at the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation and usually works with 15 survivors at a time.
Many of the victims’ stories are similar: an agent goes to a Vietnamese village and tells girls and their families he can take the girls to the border with China, where they can buy cheap clothes made by popular fashion labels.
The agent and the girl cross the border illegally into China, usually on a boat, without the girl knowing. Once in mainland China, she is forced into prostitution.
China has an estimated 3.2 million enslaved people, the second largest population of enslaved people by country after India, according to the Global Slavery Index 2014, published by the Walk Free Foundation.
Vietnam ranks 17th on the index, with 322,200 slavery victims. The report also rates both the Chinese and the Vietnamese governments relatively low in their response to the problem (Vietnam ranks 73rd and China 91st, out of 167 countries).
Escaping from slavery can be a complex process. Sometimes victims get hold of a cell phone or convince a client to let them call their families in Vietnam. The families then report the trafficking to the Vietnamese police, who contact the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation. The foundation sends a lawyer to China, who works with the authorities there and brings the survivors back to Vietnam.
Thi Minh Dinh and her colleagues take over from there. The survivors stay in a recovery house for up to two weeks and get medical checkups, before they meet with the police to make a statement.
Thi Minh Dinh works with survivors on 6- or 12-month programmes, which include assistance with food, accommodation and vocational training. She sometimes visits them in their villages to make sure they are adjusting to life back home, since they can be stigmatised by their communities.
Since she is permanently on call, Thi Minh Dinh finds it hard to detach from her work and the trauma associated with it.
“I think I’m alone sometimes,” she said. “I don’t receive much support from other people. They want to support me, but honestly they don’t know how to support me. I have a family; I have a son. I spend so much time on my job, not with my son, and I think it’s not good for me.”
Her family supports her, she said, so she carries on.
“You need to be behind the survivor, (help them with) whatever they need.”
(Editing by Katherine Baldwin)
((Simina Mistreanu was a participant on a Reporting Trafficking and Slavery course held by Thomson Reuters Foundation in parallel with the foundation’s Trust Women Conference. Simina is a Romanian journalist working with journalism non-profit Media DoR Association))
