Kimberley - Street prostitution is apparently on the increase in the Northern Cape due to the growing number of child-headed households.
This is according to the Young Communist League of South Africa, which said in a statement issued on Monday, that an increase in street prostitution, especially involving girls and young women, had been noted.
The provincial spokesman of the YCLSA, Lebogang Olyn, said that, following interaction with a number of these women in areas such as Kimberley, Colesburg, De Aar, Barkly West and other areas in the Province, it emerged that young people were turning to prostitution in order to make a living as many of them came from child-headed homes or were single parents with no education.
Olyn added that prostitutes were being harassed by the police, which served as a reminder of the illegality of their offences, as well as the immoral and unethical nature and character of prostitution, and the fact that they should find other forms of generating an income.
“Some of them face circumstances such as abuse within the family, poverty and hunger, unemployment or lack of money to further their studies and they therefore turn to prostitution as a solution to their problems.
“The prostitutes are also objects of syndicates, who give them accommodation in the city, pay their electricity, rent and buy them groceries, in exchange for selling their bodies and paying the proceeds to their owners.
“On a daily basis, these young women are subjected to humiliating circumstances because all that they wanted was to earn a living. They are subject to the cold of the winter and the heat of the summer, all in the name of this new form of slavery,” Olyn said.
He added that they were also victims of petty crimes because the perception was that they have money on them.
Olyn pointed out that the prostitutes were also being given drugs as a means for them to forget the miseries of their trade and the abuse at the hands of their owners and their customers.
“Some of the prostitutes contract HIV/Aids because some men force themselves on them and because they are defenceless, they submit to the pressure of sex without protection.
“They cannot run to their parents because in the eyes of their families they have become outcasts. They cannot run to the police because they believe that their crime of being prostitutes is greater than that of rape and abuse.
“They cannot run to their owners and the drug cartels because they will be told that it is the work that they have chosen and must face the consequences. And thus, the only thing they can turn to is a night of booze and drugs.”
He added that society had “created laws and morals based on various philosophical and ideological orientations which labelled prostitution as evil and satanic, and those who engaged in it should not belong in society”.
Olyn added that the fact that prostitution was illegal generated new forms of corruption and abuse because those who prostituted their bodies for income, knew that they could not find any other home in the law.
“They are being used to traffic drugs by those who own them, and therefore perpetuate another form of crime.
“We need to realise that these activities that we deem as immoral, are not as a result of the choosing of those who perpetuate them. They are the result of the material, social and economic conditions that these people find themselves in.
“We need to intensify the distribution of condoms and make sure that they reach this section of the community and we need to popularise the female condom.”
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