Name: The Scary World of Bride Trafficking in Asia
Uploaded: 2025-08-25T14:15:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Scary World of Bride Trafficking in Asia' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Scary World of Bride Trafficking in Asia' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-25. Transcript available.

take me into some of that bride trafficking because it sounds bride you're like
oh
congratulations you know you're like trafficking you're like oh this took a
turn you know in just
one word um yeah take me through some of that what do you kind of learn like
what took you over there
in the first place and then what's that relationship between uh china and vietnam
yeah so we started
seeing these videos online of essentially these women a lot of times girls
teenage girls in
markets in broad daylight being nabbed from the side of the street or these
markets and then
and being kidnapped sometimes real yes this these exist and against their will
you'd see them
screaming and yelling and and we were what is this and we found out that a lot
of them were being
victims of this bride trafficking where it exists because in china you know for
many years they had
it started in 1970 they started the one child policy so this one i remember
seeing this one
you see there's a woman there oh how scary sometimes it's their own families
that sell them
um a lot of times they're just kidnapped in the middle of the streets and taken
across the border
to china and people can't help and and so it's a little bit it uh it i think
people decide not to
help there's also a tradition which doesn't help the situation very much but
there's a tradition
amongst the hmong community where which is terrible but if you're engaged it's
a tradition that you
kidnap your wife to take to the father and ask for permission for her hand and
and it's sort of done
with the acceptance of both families and sometimes the woman is last to know so
they what traffickers have
been doing is that they've been using this cultural tradition to benefit their
own actual kidnapping
yeah they're sort of like a mariachi band or something and they think it's like
part of the
thing exactly oh exactly and they're actually kidnapping these women and so
they kidnapped these
women and where do they what were you able to find out more yeah so what
happens is one child policy
a lot of uh in china if you had more than one child you'll have heavy fines so
as soon as you are
pregnant people wanted to know if it was a boy or girl and in china culturally
men are the bread winners
they're the ones who will take care of the parents when they're older and so it's
very important to
have men and not women for them um and so there were massive amounts of abortions
done if they found
out it was a female so nowadays uh there are more men in china than there are
women oh single men and again if
you're single in china it's you're really it's looked down upon because you're
not procreating you're not
giving your parents grandkids and there's enormous pressure on these men to
find wives in a and you
know there there just aren't enough but it's not even their fault the
government set it up so that so
it's like what do you i know it's it's terrible but then obviously the last
resort is that they go into
these poor communities in vietnam and they pay these traffickers to kidnap them
and pay them thousands of
dollars to to have these women and the stories we heard were so sad i mean this
woman who was
trafficked um in some cases again the families actually sell them uh i don't
believe it was the
case with this woman she was trafficked she arrived in this apartment in the
big city in china and she
was immediately locked in a room and uh the husband would the husband would
rape her would come in and
then she got pregnant and then they took the baby as soon as they she gave
birth took her baby away from
her and then she got another baby um and then took the baby away from her and
then she was obviously
depressed so depressed uh thinking of committing suicide awful and she at that
point had given them
two children the parents the grandparents were living in the house too and
taking care of the kids
and she convinced them to let her go see her family in vietnam because she hadn't
seen for like six years
and she did and and she had to make the decision do i go and see my group my
parents in vietnam and leave my
kids behind or do i stay here as a kidnapped victim in a way that i can still
have a relationship with her
kids wow and so it was awful because she chose to go back to vietnam knowing
full well that she will
never see her kids again and she was showing me photos and it was just
heartbreaking it was really
horrible sorry to bring it down this way no i mean it's just like we live in
such uh we all live in such
different worlds so often you know i mean you can literally be falling asleep
at night in a warm bed
and you're okay and then you somebody else somewhere else is getting on a train
and having to never see
their children again you know having to make that decision yeah but how did it
behoove the the guy if
he doesn't have a wife if he needs to have a wife did he just want the woman
only for sexual purposes
do some of them like in that situation in this situation yes and other
situations they mostly
it's because of having a woman but other situations it's also for companionship
um although it's harder
if you're detained and kidnapped it's harder for you to you know take the woman
out for dinner i'd imagine
um but there are some situations where the woman sees themselves trapped and
then it's there's a lot
of shame that goes with being in that situation where then you prefer not to go
back home and you
just accept your new reality which is awful yeah it's very depressing yeah it's
like that story you
would see sometimes in movies where someone would get kidnapped and then raped
and then brought back
home and then people would shun her because she had been raped yeah and like
yeah and the same thing
actually it reminds me a lot of the african immigration and even central
american immigration
but particularly african immigration where i've done many stories about kids uh
one was a soccer
trafficking story where kids were promised by these fake agents that they would
take them to europe to
play in these big clubs and then they'd get there and they'd sell their house
sell anything they have
to pay the agent and then they'd get to europe and they'd be abandoned right
but at that point it was
they were so just embarrassed because they were sort of the hope for the whole
family right this is the
child that's going to bring us prosperity and then they were just embarrassed
so they never spoke to
their families again and and they would just live in misery on the streets of
europe so that was a
scam they were taking people there they weren't there was no soccer there was
no setup people had
paid money to be a part of this thing this opportunity yeah they made it look
great with videos and
pamphlets or whatever exactly yeah and then there was nothing there was nothing
but the shame that's
yeah well how can i go home that i'm the one i cost my whole i cost my family
everything yeah
exactly so then these stories aren't told and nobody knows that this is
actually happening because
in their minds the family saying oh he must have made it really rich he's not
contacting the family
anymore the stories that they keep hearing is of success the same happens in
the you know immigration
that we see in central america to the united states or you know the people
coming to the us a lot of them
or they are they are hearing the stories of success right and so that's in many
cases what they're
they're not hearing the stories of desperation and how hard it is to get here
yeah they're just
hearing the advertising really you know or the positive advertising um are
there brokers that
are brokering those women in those countries yeah is it like a company that's
like okay we need to
try and get this many women a month um i'd love to know that and then how many
how often is this
happening over there it's really hard to get numbers uh we spoke to
organizations who are on the
ground sort of taking care of the victims some of them managed to escape and
come back
and and they're they say it's in the thousands but it's impossible to know
exactly how many
it is unbelievable the the craziest part of it is because our hands were sort
of tied behind our
backs in terms of reporting we had the government minder with us at all times a
police officer like
everything we did we went out in the middle of the night to try to film behind
their backs it
was it was really hard but we actually were able to contact a group of local
journalists who were actually doing their own investigation
and they were um mainly chinese and they were able to film undercover so we saw
them they went and had
meetings pretending to be buyers in northern vietnam and then they also went to
some um uh brothels in vietnam
in china where you were given they showed us it was like uh lists and lists
with photos of people of girls
their bodies them you know it's not like modeling advertising right their
height their weight their
body their but it's for girls that are for sale and so it slipped he he was
seeing like a whole catalog
of beautiful girls some some of them look like they were 14 years old and they're
going through the
catalog and then they can just point and say i want this one and then that
person is delivered to you
it's crazy and a lot of them are being held basically at these brothels on the
border in china already
where this guy also got access so he went in crazy video he went in it's a long
corridor full of dark
corridor full of rooms and then they the brothel woman he told them that he was
there uh to meet a
wife and um the one woman opened the door he goes in he gets in and there's
like three or four women in
there and there's total darkness he can't see a thing at all and he's hearing
he they're communicating very
um low and in and talking to him and saying um what do you want what what sex
do you want um let's do it
because and he was like oh no because there's a journalist undercover
journalist saying i don't want
sex she's like please they'll beat us if you don't have sex with us and uh and
and he she had been locked
inside at this point by the woman the brothel owner on the outside so he had to
do it no and then he managed
to figure out a way where he started knocking on the door and saying that he
had to go that he
something had happened and came up with an excuse to leave but even him and he's
an undercover
journalist that covers the worst of the worst crimes he was telling me it was
one of the most depressing
and nerve-wracking things he's ever done in his life and these three four women
hold up in there in
total darkness and forced to have sex with men that come like this and then a
lot of them are sold to
become uh brides as well yeah it's dark is there regulation in those areas over
that sort of they
say there is but obviously what we found is that there isn't and this is part
of a new episode yeah
this is one of the episodes of this season oh yeah
Thank you.