Analysis
Charlene Smith
They stand not much more than five metres apart on Andries Pretorius road as you enter Bloemfontein. At beach bungalows at Port St Johns, schoolgirls bite their nails and undo a few buttons on their blouses for the major source of income for the town, tourism – in particular, sex tourism.
They lean into truck windows at Beaufort West and travel up and down the N1, working the route, servicing travellers.
There is a well-intentioned, but poorly conceived, conference in Cape Town next week that will look at sex tourism. Featured will be knowledgeable speakers from Europe, America, Australia who will talk about foreign tourists who pay for sex with children.
The trouble with this conference is that 68% of tourism in South Africa is domestic – and probably 90% to 95% of people who pay for sex with children are South Africans. The sex tourist is one of our own.
Your average sex tourist is not a tourist at all, just a truck driver plying his route, a businessman with time to spare, a local plumber on his lunch break, who can get oral sex for anything from R2 to R20 from these children and a “full house” for anything from R20 to about R50.
It’s done against walls in alleys, on beaches, in cars, in seedy little rooms child hookers take them to.
And condoms are used only as a way to negotiate more money.
The sex trade that plagued Thailand will never make it here, mainly because it is too far. The northern hemisphere sex traveller can get precisely what he wants in London, Russia, India and, still, Thailand.
He will often find South African children in those brothels, says Andre Neethling, head of the sexual offences unit in Johannesburg. “The traffickers say South African children are more compliant; if you threaten to give them a klap they shut up. Children from other countries are more likely to scream and be difficult.”
The conference is a way of us latching on to what is hip in Europe and not confronting our own dreadful issues. Death and prostitution are the two biggest growth industries in South Africa at present, and they are linked.
The extremely high levels of prostitution across South Africa are fuelled by deepening poverty and collapsing social services. There are children across South Africa having sex for food, for school fees, for R20 to feed their families.
As Aids leaves more child-headed households, what happened in Zimbabwe and Botswana could be replicated here. The eldest girl child cares for the family and often there is only one way to get money for food: sex. And if she contracts HIV and ultimately dies, she has at least secured a future for one or more of her siblings.
It is not sex tourism that we need fear. It is not sordid foreigners. The enemy lies within – in the behaviour patterns of South Africans and a government that does too little to uphold the constitutional protections of children, or to fight the poverty that it claims fuels Aids.