Stop the trade in human beings

South Africa is a hub of human trafficking and truckers are being used to transport poor people who are being sold as slaves, as STUART GRAHAM found.

At the Komatipoort border post, the line of trucks, busses and cars waiting to enter South Africa winds into Mozambique.

The trucks are mostly heading for Johannesburg where they will deliver their cargo to one of the city’s warehouses. Customs officers are inspecting each and every one.

It’s difficult to see how dozens of young girls from across Africa could be smuggled into South Africa, but somehow they are.

“Trucks are bringing girls into South Africa from all over Africa,” says Sr Melanie O’Connor, the Holy Family sister who heads the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference Trafficking Desk.

“The trafficking syndicate will use drivers to bring the girls in. They will do whatever it takes to supply the brothels in Johannesburg,” she explained.

Sr O’Connor, who has produced an educational booklet for truck drivers on human trafficking, says many of the young women are used as wives for miners, but most are destined for brothels, especially in the Pretoria and the Pietermaritzburg area.

Research on how many people are trafficked into South Africa each year is sketchy. One estimate is that is that the figure lies in the hundreds. Another puts the figure at more than 100000.

Experts say that South Africa is an importer of trafficked people, and also an exporter and a place of transit in the trade in human beings.

A UNICEF report in 2011 reported that children in South Africa were trafficked at twice the rate of women.

Sr O’Connor seeks to educate truck drivers about human trafficking and wants to use her booklet to do it.

She recalls how she was sparked into action while at a conference in Dar es Salaam as Archbishop Buti Tlhagale of Johannesburg, then president of the SACBC, was delivering a paper on evangelisation.

“We were asked: Where is the spiritual assistance given to truck drivers who have to undergo long and hazardous journeys? Or to those who wait long hours at border posts?” she recalled. “We were also listening to talks about human trafficking and how many of the victims are transported by truck from one country to another. Many eventually land up here in South Africa,” Sr O’Connor said.

“I said I am at the Trafficking Desk. I would like to introduce a truckers against human trafficking project.”

A conference was held with truck owners in South Africa in April 2013. Truck owners suggested they make their own “Truckers Against Trafficking” stickers and accepted the idea of a human trafficking booklet.

“We want them to know that it is a serious crime if they know they are transporting people who are being trafficked,” Sr O’Connor says.

The SACBC is working with the Corridor Empowerment Project, which provides services to truck drivers at 22 centres around South Africa, to distribute the booklets.

Sr O’Connor recalls how one young woman came to Johannesburg by bus after being told by a woman that she would get money for school fees by being a child minder. “The woman told her that her sister was looking for a child minder and so she accepted the job,” she said.

“Many of the girls are coaxed in through false job offers. They often find themselves working in kitchens or looking after children and scrubbing floors for no pay in often intolerable conditions.”

A large number of trafficked women, however, are duped into coming to South Africa for sexual exploitation.

“There are some survivors who say they became addicted to drugs  they were given and that they had to entertain a number of men every night without payment,” Sr O’Connor said.

She says in a recent case a girl from Mozambique was rescued after she jumped off the back of a truck in Johannesburg. The trafficking desk is trying to find out who the girl is.

Sr O’Connor says when she comes across a victim of trafficking, she immediately telephones the elite crime fighting unit, the Hawks, which has a dedicated Trafficking Desk.

The Hawks will place the victim in a shelter, but the problems set in when the women leave the shelter.

The bishops’ conference aims to help these women, but bureaucracy sometimes gets in the way.

Sr O’Connor explained: “We have helped some of the girls to do a matric course at the University of Port Elizabeth, but we have a problem when they are from other countries. They may not write matric unless they have identity documents. Getting them that identification is often a challenge.”

A report issued last year,

titled “LexisNexis Human Trafficking Awareness”, estimated that around 100000 people are trafficked in South Africa every year.

According to the report, the main  factors driving human trafficking in South Africa are sexual exploitation, forced labour, drugs and “a new trend” of parents selling their children for adoption or sex.

Alarmingly, LexisNexis found, 16,6% of media reports on human trafficking cases concerned organ trafficking.

The organisation also found that “more and more evidence is emerging which suggests that traffickers are transitioning from using victims solely for sexual exploitation to using them as drug mules or decoys”.

After years of failing to implement specific legislation that would criminalise human trafficking, South Africa finally got such a law in July year when President Jacob Zuma signed the TIP Act, more formally called “The Prevention and Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act No. 7 of 2013”.

Human Trafficking fact-file

Traffickers look for the most vulnerable children around nine to 15 years of age because they are more compliant and will do things out of fear.

• In 2010, there were 20000 to 30000 children who were prostituted. The figure now stands at 45000. (Pretoria News, May 24, 2013)

• As many as 800000 people may be trafficked across borders every year, with many more trafficked within the borders of their own countries. (Cape Argus, February 13, 2013)

• 100000 people are trafficked into, through and from South Africa every year. (Weekend Post, October 8, 2011)

• In 2011, 500 trafficked people, mostly from Burundi and Zimbabwe, were reunited with their families, including 36 children. (Cape Argus, February 13, 2013)

• In March 2010, the National Prosecuting Authority issued a report called “Tsireledzani: Understanding the Dimensions of Human Trafficking in Southern Africa”. The report found South Africa to be a destination country for long-distance flows of people (mainly women) trafficked from East Asia and South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. It also found South Africa’s neighbours supplied most of the victims for prostitution, as domestics, forced labour, for drug trafficking and criminal activity. (Cape Argus, February 13, 2013)

• Victims of trafficking, in particular sexual exploitation, come from all over—Russia, Taiwan, Mozambique—and are sent as far away as the United States. They are interviewed in their own countries, in a professional office environment, with promises of medical aid, food, pay and travel allowances. Traffickers are smart, well-dressed and respectable. They usually have business fronts. (Sunday Tribune, February 26, 2012)

• With an estimated turnover of $870 billion a year, organised criminal network funds are worth more than six times the amount of official development assistance. Human trafficking, meanwhile, brings in about $32 billion annually, while some estimates place the global value of smuggling of migrants at $7 billion a year. (Business Day, July 17, 2012)

• Traffickers range from inexperienced individuals to experienced organised networks. When traffickers operate in large criminal groups, they have accomplices who facilitate the transportation and exploitation of victims.

Often a trafficker is an individual known to the victim. Traffickers also target vulnerable people and use recruiters to spot them and deceive them into trafficking. These recruiters are usually good at manipulating their peers and using false promises of a better life.

There are also private employment agencies, who recruit job seekers to send them abroad with the purpose of exploiting them. (The Star, June 4, 2012)

Source: LexisNexis