Cape Town - Thousands of youths between the ages of 8 to 21 years old have been lured into slavery, either labour or sexual, by human traffickers, from the Eden District alone, according to Embrace Dignity, an organisation of activists who help rescue people from slavery.
The crime of human trafficking is so “insidious” that activists fighting to stop the trafficking have been unable to get accurate figures because only 1 percent of cases are reported.
The Global Slavery Index estimates that 248 700 people in the country live in modern slavery, said Claudia Burger of Anex (Activists Networking Against the Exploitation of Children).
Anex was engaged in networking with trucking associations and truckers along the N1 and have appealed to motorists travelling between Joburg and Cape Town this holiday season to report whatever incidents they may see.
Farmers in the Touws River area reported that they had seen truckers from one company stop to use and discard young women on several occasions, Burger said.
Police spokesman Captain FC van Wyk said: “We want people to report incidents because we need to investigate these incidents.”
The police had not received reports of human trafficking along the N1, he said.
Freed sex slave and author of the book, Exit, Grizelda Grootboom of Embrace Dignity, said she spent two years, from 2014 to 2016, in and around the truck stop at Beaufort West. Through her conversation with locals and her observations, she estimates around 50 000 youth between the ages of 8 and 21 had either been sold by their parents to human traffickers or had been lured away.
Grootboom, who had been sold into slavery when she was 18 by a woman she thought was a friend, spent 10 years drugged and in sexual slavery in Joburg, said: “A trafficker can earn
R12 000 a day, selling a body over and over, every hour to different men.
“It is difficult to get away. I got away when I fell pregnant and the trafficker had the baby aborted at six months in the back room of a club. When I refused to go back to work, he beat me up and assaulted me,” she said.
Euna Wentzel, a human rights activist in Beaufort West, said that from all her years of retrieving young girls from the clutches of traffickers, she did not dispute Grootboom’s estimate of 50 000 children who could have gone missing from the town.
Sylvia Jooste, who works with 700 abused, neglected and vulnerable women, said at 18, after matric, she was without work in her home town of Murraysburg and she answered an advert, promising matriculants work during the day and a chance to study at night.
She realised something was amiss when six girls were taken to an empty upper room in a house in Parow and locked away for the night. In the morning two of them were taken to a shop in Atlantis, to work and were verbally abused when they did not know how to operate a till.
Cape Argus