As many as “30,000 kids trafficked in SA” read a headline in
The Times in October 2013. A similar article appeared in the Pretoria News,
suggesting that “at least 30,000 children” are trafficked and prostituted
annually in South Africa and “50 per cent of them are under the age of 14”. Rawlins
said she had been misquoted in the Pretoria News article and said she had told
the newspaper that there are 30,000 children “currently” being prostituted in
South Africa, not annually as they reported. However, the International
Organisation for Migration’s 2008 report “No Experience Necessary”: The
Internal Trafficking of Persons in South Africa does not estimate that there
are 30,000 children currently being trafficked for the purpose of prostitution
in South Africa. Nor does it claim that 50% are under the age of 14. The paper
attributed the claim to Roxanne Rawlins of Freedom Climb, “a project that works
with trafficked people around the globe”. In May 2013, Margaret Stafford, the
coordinator for the Salvation Army’s anti-trafficking campaign, reportedly told
The Star: “In 2010, we had 20,000 to
30,000 children prostituted – now the figure stands at 45,000.”
Are 30,000 children trafficked each year in South Africa? The
South African government is citing it as a reason for introducing stricter
regulations for children traveling into and out of the country. The South
African Department of Home Affairs started enforcing new travel regulations in
June 2015. Children under the age of 18 must now carry their full, or
“unabridged”, birth certificate when crossing SA's borders. This shows the
names of both parents. A month before the regulations came into effect,
director-general of the department, Mkuseli Apleni, briefed Parliament on the
new travel requirements. In his presentation he was reported to have claimed
that an estimated 30,000 children were trafficked through South Africa every
year. His presentation stated that one of the benefits of requiring minors to
travel with an unabridged birth certificates was “protecting them from child
trafficking”.
Available research only sheds light on detected victims. International
Organisation for Migration reported assisting 306 victims of trafficking in the
southern African region between January 2004 and January 2010. Of these, 57
were children. In 2011, they reported assisting 13 victims in South Africa, but
did not state how many were children. In its 2014 Global Report on Trafficking
in Persons, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime stated that “the
police reported to have detected 155 victims of trafficking (of all ages)
during the fiscal years 2011/12 and 2012/13” in South Africa. Home Affairs
Minister Malusi Gigaba in June this year said his department had recorded no
instances of child trafficking between 2009/10 and 2011/12. Between 2012/13 and
2014/15 they had detected 23 victims.
The director of the Centre for Child Law at the University
of Pretoria, Professor Ann Skelton, has said her centre believes the new
requirements are “far too broad” and that “the inconvenience to ordinary people
far outweighs the actual risk of trafficking”.
Liesl Muller and Patricia Erasmus, both attorneys at Lawyers
for Human Rights, previously told Africa Check that the measures will not
prevent child trafficking. “Real human traffickers don’t follow legitimate and
documented methods of travel but cross the border in illegitimate and
clandestine circumstances. The regulations won’t prevent this,” they said.
The sex work industry and human trafficking are often
presented as linked and interdependent but the reality is that there is little
tangible evidence available that human trafficking within South Africa plays a
large part in the sex trade. In a 2010 brief for the African Centre for
Migration and Society, researchers Marlise Richter and Tamlyn Monson
highlighted the importance of not conflating sex work and human trafficking:
“The difference between sex work and trafficking for the purpose of sexual
exploitation is that sex work reflects an individual’s decision to engage in a
sexual transaction, while exploitation through trafficking occurs against the
will of the victim.” A senior researcher at South Africa’s Institute for Security
Studies’, Chandre Gould, found little evidence of trafficking in the sex
industry in Cape Town. Only 8 of the 164 women she canvassed said that they had
at one time been a victim of human trafficking-like practices. “This finding is
likely to cause controversy,” she writes. “An enormous amount of donor money is
available specifically for projects that counter trafficking, so organisations
working in this area potentially stand to lose funding if trafficking is not in
fact as prevalent as assumed.”
No comments:
Post a Comment