The harrowing case of seven-year-old Sheldean Human of Pretoria Gardens, who disappeared two weeks ago and was found dead on Monday evening, has reignited public fears over the abduction of children and child trafficking.
Two Pretoria human rights law bodies have revealed that they are investigating allegations of children being trafficked into Pretoria from several African countries.
University of Pretoria Centre for Child Law (UPCCL) and Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) are working on separate cases involving children being trafficked into South Africa from central and eastern African countries.
South Africa, which has no laws outlawing the trafficking of people, is facing a major problem, according to the International Organisation of Migration (IOM).
Thousands of abducted women and children are brought into the country every year.
The organisation's Pretoria office said human trafficking earned the world's criminal syndicates between $8-billion (about R60-billion) and $12-billion (about R84-billion) a year.
It was the third most profitable income source for crime syndicates, behind illegal arms and narcotics trafficking, the organisation said.
The IOM believes up to 1-million people a year are trafficked across the world's borders. Up to 800 000 of these cases involve women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation.
It estimates that 400 000 of those trafficked are children.
UPCCL's Carina du Toit confirmed that they were investigating a case of children being flown into South Africa from a central African country.
"We believe that the children in this case are vulnerable to abuse," she said.
She declined to comment further for fear of jeopardising the investigation.
Du Toit said there was a "huge problem" with child trafficking in South Africa.
This problem, she said, was exacerbated by the fact that South Africa's legal system had not put into force legislation that deemed human trafficking as a crime for which those involved could be prosecuted.
She said people caught for human trafficking could only be prosecuted for common law crimes such as kidnapping or abduction, for sexual crimes such as assault or rape, or for smuggling.
Claudia Serra, LHR's operations manager and training co-ordinator, said they were investigating a separate case of human trafficking, also involving children.
She said the children apparently were being brought from several African countries to Pretoria.
Serra said that they had dealt with a case of child trafficking in the past and were still helping the victim.
IOM information co-ordinator Karen Blackman also stressed the need for more action against human trafficking in South Africa.
However, she said, the country was moving slowly towards creating legislation that could help counteract this problem.
"South Africa has ratified the UN protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children," she said.
Thereby South Africa was legally bound to the protocol, which compels the national government to develop anti-trafficking laws.
The country was in the process of doing this, she said.
Blackman said ongoing research, including interviews with 150 women and children assisted by IOM's countertrafficking assistance programme, showed just how severe the situation was in the country.
"It is clear that human trafficking is a serious problem in South Africa."
Blackman said: "Groups involved in trafficking people are well-organised clandestine syndicates that earn money by selling both adults and children into forced labour and prostitution.
"These syndicates operate without fear of repercussions from buying and selling people because they know that there are no laws in South Africa that they can be prosecuted under for trafficking in people," she said.
Blackman said that thousands of women and children were brought into South Africa from countries such as Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, China, Bulgaria, the Philippines and Thailand.
Many South Africans were also being trafficked to Macau near China, Ireland, UK and Israel.
Pamela Silolo, child rights NGO Molo Songololo's trafficking co-ordinator, said Gauteng, Cape Town and Durban were the primary destinations trafficked women and children were sent to.
Most of them had been taken from small towns in their home countries.
Silolo said that procuring women and children was made easier by poverty and unemployment, family breakups, violence, lack of education and peer pressure.
"The demand factors include changes in informal economies, an increased number of criminal syndicates becoming involved in the trade, increased demand for cheap labour and the increasing sexualisation of children," she said.
Blackman said the only way to stop this was to pass comprehensive human trafficking legislation and for the government, civil society and NGOs to conduct extensive awareness-raising campaigns.
Du Toit said that they were hoping that the new Children's Act, which contained the UN protocol in one of its chapters, would be in force this year.
"We are really hoping that the chapter containing the UN protocol will be in force by early this year," she said.
Silolo said until such legislation was enforced in full, the many victims of human trafficking would remain in purgatory.
- Differences:
- Smuggling refers to the illegal facilitation of border crossing between the smuggler and smugglee, which is complete once the smugglee has successfully entered the country of destination.
- Trafficking involves the recruitment, transportation and exploitation of an individual, whereby the recruitment contains an element of deception and entails a severe violation of the human rights of the victim by people involved in the trafficking process. Victims of trafficking are regularly exposed to physical and psychological abuse, denied legal and labour rights and medical care and are often forced into unwanted relationships of dependency with their traffickers.
- South African Missing and Exploited Children Centre: 0861 647746
- Crime Stop: 08600 10111
- International Organisation of Migration: human trafficking hotline: 0800 555 999.