The United Kingdom is under fire from activists for failing to protect Vietnamese victims of trafficking, many of them children.

According to figures from the UK’s National Crime Agency, suspected Vietnamese trafficking victims are half as likely to be granted protection as other victims.

Activists say the UK government treated trafficking as an immigration issue rather than a human rights issue.

Vietnamese people make up the second largest nationality of people trafficked to the UK.

In 2015, the British newspaper The Guardian conducted an investigation, estimating that about 3000 Vietnamese children were caught in modern slavery.

Vietnamese trafficking victims are often lured to the UK with promises of work but instead become locked into debt, and forced into cannabis farms, brothels and exploitation in private homes.

A lawyer at the Migrant Legal Project told The Guardian that he saw many Vietnamese children working on cannabis farms who were not identified as victims of trafficking.

Instead these children were classed as offenders and deported back to Vietnam often with psychological and medical conditions.

With a lack of reintegration services in Vietnam, these victims are at risk of being lured back into the trafficking cycle.

– TiVi Tuan-san