"Cambodia urged to boost funding for 'bride trafficking' pacts", 1 April 2019

New agreements reached between Phnom Penh and Beijing to combat the trafficking of Cambodian ‘brides’ to China will be useless without fresh funding and stricter enforcement, anti-trafficking groups warned ... Cambodia’s Interior Minister Sar Kheng … announced a series of deals to fight transnational crimes, including human trafficking, however no details were made available.

Chou Bun Eng, deputy head of the ministry’s National Committee to Counter Human Trafficking, told … she had no new funds to address the issue and referred further questions to a ministry spokesman who said he had no information to share.

Over the past decade, tens of thousands of Southeast Asian women have been lured to China by criminal networks promising lucrative jobs, only to be sold as brides as China grapples with a gender imbalance of tens of millions of men.

“Its happening every day, this bride trafficking,” said Dy Thehoya, senior program officer at the Centre for Alliance of Labour and Human Rights, a Cambodian charity that helps repatriate trafficking survivors.

“The government creates mechanisms to address the problem but they are only on paper. In reality, they are ineffective due to poor implementation,” he said… Cambodian women who have returned from China often describe experiences of sexual, physical and psychological abuse, confinement, torture and forced labor.

… “Sometimes, we simply can not help the victims” said Sa Im, who works on women’s issues at the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, a human rights group… “Officials and anti-trafficking police on the ground know and understand the problem but have no budget support,” she said.