|
Agenda journal intern Arthi Sanpath speaks to organisations that help trafficked girls and young women to return to lives in safety and investigates what impact the 2010 soccer world cup, to be hosted by South Africa, might have on human trafficking in Southern Africa.
When night falls in Rossburgh, a working class district in South Africa's east coast city Durban, teenage girls can be found standing under streetlamps, wandering aimlessly a few metres up and down the road, in clothes that give them no protection against the cold. They wait on the sidewalks to attract the attention of men who they can sell their bodies to.
Many of the girls are under age and have been lured into sex work against their will. They have been trafficked from rural areas or across the South African border. Their ability to escape has been taken away from them as, upon arrival in the country, their identity documents have been confiscated. They have been forced into drug abuse and debt-bondage and, often, the legal system criminalises them as illegal immigrants, sex workers or drug users.
To help these young women escape this modern form of slavery, a group of volunteers from Youth Ending Commercial and Sexual Exploitation of Children (YECSEC), a Durban-based NGO, regularly makes their way to areas infamous for teenage prostitution where they hand out condoms.
‘Girls as young as nine years are out there on the streets [working] as prostitutes,' said YECSEC member Brian Mchunu who is also a counsellor with Lifeline, an NGO offering counselling services, healthcare and HIV/AIDS advice.
The volunteers encourage the young sex workers to practice safe sex but, at the same time, use condom distribution as a way of getting in contact with them, and eventually winning their trust. It is the volunteers' aim to invite them to their offices for counselling and to ultimately help them gain skills to find employment and escape a life of drugs, violence and sex work.
Thousands of women and girl-children are trafficked into South Africa every year, and NGOs are concerned that this already high number is going to increase drastically when the country will host the soccer world cup in 2010. Human trafficking is a multi-billion dollar trade.
‘As with the German world cup and other global sporting events, it is anticipated that trafficking of both women and children for the purposes of sexual exploitation will increase in South Africa and the region prior to and during 2010,' commented Karen Blackman, information coordinator at the Pretoria-based International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
According to IOM, many women and children trafficked into South Africa come from southern African countries, such as Lesotho, Mozambique and Malawi. 
Blackman further explained that major international sporting events - mainly attended by men - generally increased the demand for sexual services, whatever the country. South African NGOs now fear that the world cup will attract traffickers who are keen to make huge profits from the increased demand in sex workers.
NGOs working with trafficked persons have already started to work to prevent South Africa from experiencing a similar situation to Germany, which held a soccer world cup earlier this year. ‘Our hope for [the world cup in] 2010, is to not expose our country as a sex tourism [destination],' said Mchunu.
YECSEC is currently setting up ‘a continuous campaign up until and beyond 2010' to raise awareness of the threat trafficking of women and girl-children might pose to the global sporting event. ‘There will be a possibility of [increased] child prostitution and, as a result, trafficking across [South African] borders and from one part of South Africa to another,' said YECSEC consultant Nandi Msezane. Msezane has trained members of the youth group in media lobbying to ‘get the message about trafficking out there'.
One of the organisation's plans is to engage media and government in their efforts to end trafficking of girls, with special focus on child prostitution and pornography. ‘It seems our government is not looking at these issues,' said YECSEC volunteer Nombuso Ngcobo, adding that ‘[we] need to lobby government and other stakeholders'.
IOM has also initiated a prevention programme geared at the world cup. Over the next three years, it will provide training to government, civil society and NGOs to build capacity to prevent trafficking as well as to identify and assist trafficked persons. IOM and YECSEC are following the example of German NGOs that ran campaigns to avoid a drastic increase in trafficked women well before the start of the world cup that they claimed had some success.
Before the start of this year's world cup, human rights groups feared that hundreds if not thousands of women would be trafficked into Germany. IOM, the MTV Europe Foundation and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency therefore partnered to produce public service announcements to warn the population of trafficking of women for sexual exploitation into Germany and ask them to notify authorities if they witnessed incidents.
‘Germany was aware of the potential for trafficking and took preventative measures to raise awareness on the issue. A toll-free help line was set up, and a major information campaign was launched,' explained Blackman.
Almost two million children, mainly girls,are sexually exploited worldwide
Some anti-trafficking activists doubt, however, that NGOs and aid organisations can pull off an enormous awareness campaign before and during the world cup on their own. Babalwa Makawula, one of the founding members of the Johannesburg-based New Life Centre (NLC), a drop-in centre offering counselling, skills-building and health advice services, says that ‘urgent action from government' was needed, as well as financial support. ‘If nothing is done by 2010, it will be a disaster,' she added.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) has criticised governments around the world for the slow response to the fight against trafficking, especially now that 2010 is less than four years away. ‘Governments need to get serious about identifying the full extent of the problem so that they can get serious about eliminating it. The fact that this form of slavery still exists in the 21st century shames us all,' said UNDOC executive director Antonia Maria Costa.
Makawula said the NLC wants to set up drop-in centres throughout the country, specifically in locations where world cup soccer matches will take place, ‘so that people can come to the centre if they have a problem'. On average, between 30 and 40 young women visit the organisation's drop-in centres each day, and NLC expects these numbers to increase drastically during the sporting event.
According to Makawula, the fast money to be made from human trafficking might tempt people, especially men and women suffering from poverty or who have debts, to ‘sell' young women to traffickers. She explained that many girls were trafficked or sold to traffickers by people known to them, including their boyfriends, parents, relatives and friends.
NLC is expecting traffickers to bring young women from South Africa's neighbours Zimbabwe and Mozambique into the country, as well as from Thailand and China. ‘Many come to South Africa through organised crime syndicates and often with the help of corrupt home affairs officials,' claimed Makawula.
In-country trafficking is yet another problem. In South Africa, many children were forced out of their homes due to poverty, according to Mchunu, and commercial sex work was regarded as a form of financial relief. However, the price these children have to pay is high. Many trafficked children ended up being addicted to drugs and then selling their bodies finance their addiction, Mchunu explained.
Apart from women, children are particularly vulnerable to trafficking. ‘Abuse of children cannot be tolerated during the world cup or any other time,' said United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) executive director Ann Veneman, noting that ‘caught in an underworld of illegality and violence, trafficked and sexually exploited children virtually disappear.' UNICEF estimates that almost two million children, mainly girls, are sexually exploited worldwide.
African countries present a wide range of factors that contribute to child trafficking, including civil wars, conflict, natural disasters, poverty, hunger and the absence of parents.
 ‘We know the root causes, who the vulnerable children are, where they come from,' said Maria Calivis, Central and Eastern Europe regional director of UNICEF. ‘Clearly, to develop a tight, effective network that protects children, we must go to the source, listen to what children have to say on the matter and plug the gaps in our knowledge of trafficking patterns and in our approaches and messages,' she added.
South African NGOs, such as YECSEC and NLC, operate on this very principle with their outreach programmes. The organisations specifically target areas where large numbers of truck drivers pass through or rest for the night - as these tend to develop into trafficking hot spots.
In Durban, where YECSEC operates, counsellors often worked with young women from Swaziland, a country much poorer than neighbouring South Africa. ‘They are made false promises by truck drivers who tell them there are jobs available in South Africa. The girls often pay the driver R30 ($4) to R60 (8), only to be raped and assaulted during the journey,' said Mchunu.
One of the most important factors, he explained, was developing a level of trust with trafficked persons. He pointed out that, as some of them have been raped during their journey to SA or come from broken homes, their trust in people is often broken. But despite going out on regular trips to speak to girls, the volunteers' attempts to encourage the girls to visit the centre are not as rewarding as they would like it to be. ‘Out of ten [girls] maybe three will respond, but we always promise to return,' said Mchunu.
Communication barriers make an already complicated task sometimes even more difficult. Many trafficked girls came from francophone Africa and had only little knowledge of English, he explained, and it was therefore often a complex task to find out about a trafficked person's circumstances.
Apart from its outreach programmes, YECSEC works with two safe houses in Johannesburg, named Thandeka and Sithabile. ‘We have girls from Rwanda, Angola, Mozambique and even Thailand at our safe houses,' said Msezane.
Whilst at the safe house, girls are enrolled in schools that employ educators who are trained in dealing with trafficked children. They also participate in personal growth classes as well as income-generating and skills-building programmes, such as beadwork, painting, jewellery- and postcard-making. Moreover, they receive counselling as well as guidance on issues such as HIV and AIDS, nutrition and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs).
Once living in a safe house, NGOs try to repatriate trafficked persons - but usually only with limited success. While some country's embassies, such as the Thailand consulate, cooperated well with anti-trafficking NGOs and helped to facilitate the process, repatriation to other countries proved to be much more complicated.
It is difficult to send trafficked children back to countries that are in ‘political turmoil' as the parents cannot be identified or located and the girls do not have safe environments to return to,' explained Msezane.
‘Some girls have to stay here for quite some time,' she added.
With less than four years to go, South Africa will still have to face the challenge of fighting the arrival and transfer of trafficked persons ‘up until and beyond' the soccer world cup.
 Arthi Sanpath is the Agenda journal intern for 2006. She has a National Diploma in Journalism from the Durban University of Technology, South Africa. During her studies, she served as youth editor of the Africa Environment Outlook-for-youth publication and has interned at Country Life magazine. Her interests lie in gender and environmental issues. She is a representative on the body Tunza, the youth division of the United Nations Environment Programme. Email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
