“Maak ’n move daar (make a move there).” That’s the phrase men use when they see a girl they fancy in a so-called lolly lounge.
They approach the owner of the place and request to have sex with the girls. The girl who is chosen doesn’t know any better because all she wants is a fix to get high.
The men are allowed to do anything they want to the girls. They are sold for sex for as little as R25.
“It’s like living in a cocoon,” said Nicollette Abrahams, 31, of Waterval, who spoke of the nightmare she had undergone after she had became hooked on drugs.
The recovering addict has been clean for six months and knows all about the drug dens. She started taking drugs at the age of 13, two months after her mother died.
“I started off just smoking weed, then I moved to ecstasy and moved on to crack and crystal meth,” she said on Monday.
Abrahams said the lounges were like dumps – the toilets did not flush and were filled with waste. There was no running water. The floors were filled with pipes, paper and dagga, among other drugs.
She said the rooms often contained just a base and a mattress.
Abrahams said girls ended up in the lounges by chance. “They’re scared to go home. They don’t mean to go forever. They tell themselves they’ll just take one hit and go back home,” she said.
Abrahams said when she went to these places, she would end up becoming nervous for a fix and find herself moving to the next lounge with whoever wanted to take her.
“I would leave my children for a whole month, chasing drugs. It’s like in your head you’re saying, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to, but I know I need a fix,’” she said.
Abrahams said the mistake parents made was to think the girls liked being in those lounges.
“It just goes on and on. The drug tells you not to go home... The men at these lounges even convince you your family doesn’t want you any more,” she said.
Abrahams found herself in the same space as men old enough to be her father. “In theses lounges, you find guys as old as 60 hanging around there. They are husbands and fathers,” she said. “They welcome you so nicely and you just have fun with them and because you are having fun, you bring a buddy the next time around then another one and the cycle continues,” said Abrahams.
She has been raped three times and was drugged up on all three occasions. “The third time it happened, I was sold by a friend,” she said.
After being invited to a party, a friend wanting to buy drugs from someone offered Abrahams as payment. “I didn’t even know I had been sold (for sex),” she said.
Abrahams considers herself lucky. She said girls were killed after they had been raped in some instances.
A lot of the girls choose not to speak of their experience in the lounges. “No girl wants to say that she had five guys sleeping with her, but we all know the truth,” she said.
In Eldorado Park, the dens are called suikerhuisies (sugar houses).
Community police forum chairman Victor Olivier said on Monday that there were at least 10 in the area. Girls as young as 12 and 13 wandered in and out of them. That was how the residents knew.
The girls went in and only came out days later. “From about 2010, it has been getting strong here,” said Olivier. “It’s when the tik thing came to Eldos. That’s where it started.”
And while some children might be abducted, most were running away from home, he said.
“The kids don’t go to school any more,” he said. “Their friends tell them about where the suikerhuisies are and they go smoke for the day. They say it takes them away from Eldos and puts them in a place where they want to be.”
When police raids were conducted on the houses – and they often were, said Olivier – it was only about a week before the girls found their way back to them.
“It’s a big issue in this area,” he said. – Additional reporting by Kristen van Schie.
The Star