EMSIE FERREIRA, Johannesburg | Thursday
CHILD sex trafficking – with children as young as four – is on the rise in South Africa, driven by deepening poverty that sometimes sees a family force a child into prostitution as its only source of income, says a report released this week.
The report says there are an estimated 28000 child prostitutes in the country and that girls as young as four are being are sold to South Africans and foreigners for sex.
The report was drafted by the non-governmental organisation Molo Songololo, whose researchers documented child prostitution in four of the country’s nine provinces through interviews with social workers, police and prostitutes in the first half of this year.
Senior researcher Karen Koen said they found there had, ironically, been an increase in children being abducted and sold for sex since the country became a democracy in 1994, along with an increase in unemployment and poverty.
The researchers found that in Cape Town – where an estimated quarter of the prostitutes are under-age – poor girls were lured into sex work through newspaper advertisements, and that their services were again advertised in papers under titles like “Barely legal”.
According to Molo Songololo, child prostitutes are one of the main sources of income for the city’s dozens of well-established gangs.
Girls recounted that they were tattoed with a ganglord’s name, beaten and gang-raped when they tried to leave, taught to steal clients’ money and firearms, and were not given any of the money they earned.
Some of the children recounted that they were too scared to go to the police because they too were involved in sex rings, Koen said.
The lack of help from the police was evident in the girls interviewed in Cape Town because in the years that they were held captive nobody had come to rescue them, despite neighbours’ complaints of the noise coming from suburban brothels.
“The service had failed them. The only way the children could get away was to run away, there was no rescue for them,” she said.
Molo Songololo director Zurayah Abuss said the organisation in 1996 found an eight-year-old boy who was prostituted by his family as a source of income, and more recently a five-year-old who had been abused and was HIV positive. – AFP