KAMPONG CHAM, Cambodia Sixteen-year-old Mona* sits on the floor of her familys one-room wooden hut, cradling her plump 3-month-old daughter. As light pours in through the cracks of a shuttered window, several of Monas six siblings lie sleeping on mats strewn around the room. They are exhausted from a night shift of harvesting gum at a nearby plantation in southeast Cambodia, a few hours north of the capital Phnom Penh.

At first glance, Mona looks like any other young mother in rural Cambodia, spending her day breastfeeding her baby and rocking her in a hammock. But the story of how Mona became a mother is different from that of most young mothers in the country. In fact, she only learned she was pregnant after escaping the home of her Chinese husband and taking shelter in the Cambodian consulate in Shanghai.

Mona is one of dozens of Cambodian women who are trafficked to China and sold into matrimony each year. Driven by the extreme poverty in Cambodias villages and a lack of economic opportunities for women , young girls are recruited into Chinas flourishing bride market , where women are sold like cattle.

While there are no official figures on the total number of Cambodian women trafficked to China and sold into marriage, human rights groups put that number at dozens per year if not more. The Cambodian government reported 58 cases in 2014 of women who were repatriated after escaping situations like these in China, with an increase to 85 cases in 2015. Many more likely go under the radar.

In June, the U.S. State Department downgraded Chinas rating for human trafficking offenses, where it joins Iran and North Korea. Following years of the former one-child policy , there is now an uneven number of men versus women in China. Bachelors have been increasingly looking abroad for marriage prospects, often incentivizing a bride or her family with cash. While brides have come to China from a number of nations, especially those nearby, the forced marriage of Cambodian women to Chinese men has created a niche problem. Cambodia is an ideal market for less affluent Chinese families seeking brides for their eligible sons. And because people in rural parts of the country desperately need money, women can be bought for competitive prices.

Some women, like Mona, are convinced to accept payment for marrying a Chinese man with the usually false promise that their new spouse will send money back to their families in Cambodia. Others, however, are told they will be given a high-paying job in a Chinese factory , only to discover upon arriving in China that they are expected to marry an unknown man.

In both cases, the women are thrust into a complex human trafficking network that spans multiple borders. Mona and her older sister Theary*, who traveled together before they were sold to separate families in China, changed hands at least a dozen times before they reached the homes of their new husbands. During the roughly two weeks of travel, the girls were passed along between male Cambodian, Vietnamese and Chinese traffickers who were charged with transporting them to their final destination.