Brave Aussie man risked his life to rescue two Vietnamese friends who had been kidnapped and sold as brides in China
Ben Randall took five months to track teens down
AN AUSTRALIAN who discovered two teenage friends had been kidnapped and trafficked risked his own life to track them down and rescue them.
Ben Randall got to know the girls while teaching English in the Sa Pa region of Vietnam.
After he left the country to return home, he found out that the 16-year-olds had been taken by traffickers and sold in China so he travelled thousands of miles to track them down in an attempt to bring them home.
The brave mission could easily have turned deadly.
He told The Sun Online: “It’s a huge industry run by international crime organisations so the people who are running this don’t have a lot of respect for human life.
“I’m sure if they’d known what I was up to they wouldn’t have hesitated to bump me off.”
Ben, now 34, met the girls in 2010 in the remote mountain region and he was aware that trafficking was rife in the area.
He said: “There were a group of nine or ten girls who sold handicrafts on the corner of my street every day so we got to know each other.
“But I left town and the next year they started getting kidnapped. From that group of nine or ten girls five of them were kidnapped in separate incidents.”
The problem is rife in the area, which is close to the border of China.
Because of the one child policy in China, women are hugely outnumbered by men and girls are regularly kidnapped and sold as prostitutes and brides.
Ben explained: “Of the five girls who were trafficked four had been relatively fortunate and been sold as brides but the fifth one was sold as a prostitute.”
Due to lack of funds, Ben took two years to get back to the region by which time two girls had returned home and a third had chosen to stay in China, so he set about finding the other two.
He said: “It took five months and I ended up finding them in different parts of China to everybody’s surprise including my own.
“Originally, the only hope was to trace the traffickers and try and follow the network which turned out to be impossible, Then I got lucky because one of the girls was able to get hold of a phone in China and call her mother back in Vietnam.
“Even then she had absolutely no idea where she was in China.
“By that time she could understand some Chinese but she couldn’t read or write so she didn’t know the name of her city. She knew the name of her province so we tried to narrow it down from there.
“The first time I tried to meet her I went to the right street in the wrong city!”
When he reached first girl, Pang, he discovered that she was in touch with the second, May, by telephone.
“Their traffickers had put them in touch with each other, which seems a bit odd. I assume it was to give the girls someone to speak to in their own language so they’d be less likely to run away.
“It certainly made life easier for me.
May was further North and also didn’t know the name of her village or the nearest town and, to make matters worse, the man who had married her was controlling and rarely let her use the phone.
But the real complication, in both cases, was that they had both had a child.
Ben said: “They were really excited by the idea of going home for the first time in three years but they didn’t know what to do with the children. If it hadn’t been for the children they would have been home in a heartbeat but it would be a legal nightmare for two Vietmanese girls with no legal status in China to take a Chinese-born child away from a Chinese father.
“Also from their point of view, going back to their traditional societies with their ‘foreign child’, would make it impossible for them to remarry, to get a job, so they were faced with a choice that no mother would want to make – having to choose between her child and her freedom.”
While Ben managed to avoid being caught by traffickers, there were some hairy moments along the way.
He revealed: “At one point when I was contacting May her husband started picking up the phone and seemed to be getting wise to what was going on, and she was at risk of being sold again because to be caught with a trafficked girl means prison. It looked like he might sell her either as a bride or a prostitute.”
But the biggest threat he faced came from May’s own family, who wanted him to stop.
He said: “They are a very traditional rural family and they felt there weren’t any good options left for their daughter in Vietnam so they threatened to have me killed if I continued.
“They had three daughters and two of them were trafficked.
“But because of the antagonism I suspected for a long time she had been trafficked by her own family but that turned out not to be the case.”
After tracking the girls down Ben started to plan their escape, with the help of an Australian organisation called the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation.
But when he returned to China May decided to stay with her baby, despite constant abuse from her ‘husband’.
Ben said: “He has physically abused her, kept her prisoner in the house so it’s not a great situation.
“But when she had the choice she told me she was going to stay for the sake of her child, who is a little girl. She was worried about what would happen to her baby if she left her alone with her husband. She didn’t want her daughter to be away from her mother the way she was separated from her own mother. It was heartbreaking.
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“It was really tough and it did become very personal, watching these girls go through their decisions as to whether to leave their babies. I very much wanted to see them back in Vietnam but only they could make that choice. Neither one of those choices was a particularly good one.”
Encouraged by their contact, Pang had escaped three days before he got back.
Ben said: “She had no id and was trying to make her way across China alone, which is not advisable, but she did it.”
The journey across China was captured on camera and will feature in a documentary called
Ben said: “I had a cameraman with me but we had to go in with minimum crew, minimum equipment and look like tourists and not tell anyone what we were doing, because it is an area where traffickers are rife and it’s a very lucrative business.
“So it was either going to wind up with somebody dead or nothing would happen - and we will never know how close we came.”