Children sold into begging, pimping and drug dealing HANOI - It could have been a scene from a movie depicting the dark and decadent streets of Saigon during the Vietnam War, but instead was a real-life Saturday night incident in what was once the socially disciplined northern capital. A taxi carrying two foreigners pulled up outside a popular Hanoi bar and was immediately surrounded by a swarm of child beggars. But one young boy, barely waist-high and probably no more than eight years old, was offering something in return. "Hey mister, you want ganga, opium, heroin. You want a girl," he said, persisting despite the firm refusals of the hapless and increasingly flustered foreign visitors. The incident lends credence to recent media reports that children are being increasingly used by organised begging gangs, pimps and drug dealers. The authorities and international child welfare organisations have expressed concern at the relatively new but increasing phenomenon, which has added another dimension to the trade in children - who are most often sold or "rented" by poor farmers seeking work in the cities. A consultant's report prepared late last year for several child welfare agencies found that trafficking in children for begging and soliciting represented a new and worrying form of bonded labour. "It is . . . becoming more and more pervasive in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, but has also increased in the larger provincial cities . . . the consultants conclude that the selling of children [for these purposes] is a reality and is an under-reported aspect of trafficking," the report said. "Some parents . . . leave their children in 'care' while they go to work. The children can be rented to beggars [and] there is the suggestion that they are drugged," the report concluded. State-controlled media have published accounts of mothers in Ho Chi Minh City who rent out their children for 20,000 dong (HK$11) a day . The full extent of the problem remains unclear, but figures from Vietnam's so-called "anti-social evils" authority found the number of beggars in the southern city had increased from 1,500 in 1997 to 7,000 last year. A similar trend is evident in Hanoi, where nearly one in five street children now reportedly beg for a living. City authorities have confirmed that children are also intentionally injured in order to induce the pity of passers-by. By Huw Watkin - South China Morning Post - April 18, 2000.