Phyu was 17 when she left school and decided to leave her home in Mandalay, Myanmar. She wanted to contribute to the family's income after her father became too ill to work. A broker persuaded Phyu to go and work in China. She was told that she could get a good job as a sales girl or as an accountant.
When she arrived, Phyu was sold for 20,000 Chinese yuan (106,000 baht). She was forced to become the bride of a Chinese man.
Phyu tried to get help to leave. She called the broker and asked to go home. She was met with violence, beaten until she was unconscious while her new husband watched.
An alert neighbour reported the abuse to the police. The officers eventually found her, hands tied, blindfolded, with a cloth in her mouth, hidden under the floor of the house.
Over the past 15 years, this type of story has been repeated over and over. Young people from Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam continue to be convinced to work in richer countries.
When they arrive, they are forced into jobs they didn't want or didn't sign up for. In these jobs, they face violence, extremely difficult working conditions and exploitation.
It's a sad admission that the problem hasn't ended, despite the millions of dollars that have been poured into anti-trafficking work in the Greater Mekong Sub-region for well over a decade.
So what has been working?
Unfortunately, it's hard to say. To date there has been no substantial evidence to demonstrate the impact of the collective effort of prevention work on anti-trafficking. The approach to stop human trafficking has been mostly built on assumptions.
With this in mind, World Vision undertook a rigorous quantitative survey to find answers, test our approach, and to build the much-needed evidence to guide future prevention work.
Our anti-trafficking teams in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, with the technical support of a leading international research university, interviewed 10,000 children, young people and adults to find out why they continue to be at risk of human trafficking.
This research study revealed that the majority of children and young people already know how to migrate safely. They know they should have their passports or national identity cards with them when they travel.
Yet, many are not doing this. For instance, only 37% of Cambodian children and young people migrated with the proper identity documents and even fewer left copies of these identity documents at home with their family members.
The research also found that more Lao and Cambodian young people are migrating for work than their counterparts from Myanmar and Vietnam. These young people in Laos and Cambodia are unlikely to consult their parents before making a decision to work in another country.
Young people were also aware of the negative experiences that could be associated with migrating for work. In fact, more than a third of all children and young people who had previously migrated for work said they had endured at least one of the following negative experiences — excessive working hours, debt used as a form of control by the employer, withholding of wages by the employer, physical or mental abuse, or dangerous working conditions. Among Lao children and young people, two out of three who migrated had endured at least one of these negative experiences.
Yet despite these findings, surprisingly, the majority of children and young people were able to send money to their families back home.
And herein lies the key motivating factor. For many young people migrating for work, money is what matters. If young people can send money home, they've succeeded in their mission; the negative experiences they endure are collateral damage.
With the Asian Development Bank reporting the gap between rich and poor continuing to expand in the Greater Mekong Region, the poor are getting more desperate to find better work opportunities — whether at home or abroad.
What's more, immigration restrictions in this region make it hard for low-skilled workers to migrate legally for work. And while good anti-trafficking laws do exist across the region; sadly they are not applied everywhere or are not adequately enforced or resourced, so that children and young people are not adequately protected.
In 2013, the International Organisation for Migration estimated that 3 to 5 million people in the Greater Mekong Region migrate for work. While it may be lofty to dream of human trafficking ending, there are things that can be done to decrease the risk.
This research study shows us the anti-trafficking community need to take a wider lens to this issue by addressing greater societal gaps and economic inequalities.
World Vision has already moved from trying to scare young people about the dangers of trafficking into empowering them with knowledge about ways to stay safe if they decide to migrate.
But the anti-trafficking organisations cannot act alone. Governments should provide systems that provide passports and work permits at a low cost and in a timely manner to give them protection and allow them to work legally in destination countries. Countries who receive migrants should also have the ability to count all workers, regardless of citizenship, and ensure labour rights are extended to everyone.
For communities and for the public, there is a moral responsibility to ensure that all people are treated with dignity. Our research found that migrants were often blamed as the cause of social problems. And yet, nearly one in four Thai survey respondents in the Thai-Myanmar border areas had seen an employer put a migrant child to work in conditions they thought were "dangerous".
What's more, one in five Thais along the Thai-Myanmar and Thai-Cambodian border areas knew of an employer who made migrants work for more than 12 hours a day. However, only one out of 10 Thais that saw or knew of these exploitative practices actually reported it. This must change.
Like Phyu, we all want to improve our living conditions. But for those with limited options, many will continue to take the risk of unsafe migration despite the potential for harm.
The responsibility to protect migrant workers and their family members from exploitation must be shared by governments, civil society organisations and citizens. We need to address the underlying structures that perpetuate and allow exploitation. We need to do better.
John Whan Yoon is regional manager for World Vision's End-Trafficking-in-Persons Programme.