Johannesburg - At least 22% of children who go missing in South Africa remain unaccounted for, and 4% of those who are found turn up dead, according to statistical data on the books of Missing Children SA, a Cape Town-based tracking and recovery agency.
Cold cases in their records date back to 2011, says Bianca van Aswegen, national case officer at MCSA, which also handles missing adult cases. While they are able to recover 78% of missing children, their success rate among adults is 53%.
“Some adults disappear of their own free will,” Van Aswegen says, whereas children are relatively easy to find as they don’t usually go off on their own volition.
Van Aswegen details muthi murders, runaways, kidnappings, parental and family abductions and confirmed human trafficking cases as among the main reasons for children going missing. She is of the view that runaways often give off signs before they vanish, such as trouble at home and not doing well at school.
“Parents need to know their children.”
While these are fairly easy to curb, not so the other instances where children are removed against their will. What Van Aswegen terms “confirmed human trafficking” cases are the bane of their work.
“Many of these children are taken and forced into sex work.”
This scourge was brought to light two weeks ago when a Nigerian, Ugochukwu Eke, was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment by the Johannesburg High Court for drugging and sexually exploiting an under-age girl and living off the proceeds of this exploitation. He was also accused of being an accomplice in her rape.
The victim was said to have been only 15 years old when she vanished from her Rosettenville, Joburg, home.
Van Aswegen says the eight-year-old agency works in conjunction with the police and all their cases have to be reported to SAPS. Often the police refer cases to MCSA, says Van Aswegen, who is also a qualified criminologist. She says the parents of the 22% of the unaccounted children go through a lot of trauma and SAPS has counselling services available to the aggrieved.
“Sometimes we send out social workers (to the parents)”.
Members of the public use the services of the agency, putting out flyers of the missing children and/or adults.
Van Aswegen says they have also had cases of parental complicity in the disappearance of their children, as in the case of the 1-month-old Durban baby Siwaphiwe Mbambo, who was initially thought to have been stolen when her mother’s car was hijacked.
The mother and an accomplice have been charged with faking the abduction and appeared in the Durban Magistrate’s Court.
But in such cases, says Van Aswegen, the major concern is getting the child back, unharmed.
Johannesburg Child Welfare deals with a lot of “light” missing children cases.
The assistant director, Carol Bews, says: “Most often the ‘missing children’ that we work with are lost children who have wandered away from their parents or caregivers.
“This is often while shopping or possibly in an unfamiliar area such as a hospital or waiting at a taxi rank. He/she wanders off and when the parent or caregiver realises that the child is not there, they frantically run around and look for the child haphazardly.
“The child may have been found by someone who has then taken him/her to a member of the police services and they will then bring the child to our offices.
“Sometimes the child is reunited very quickly with the parent/caregiver.
“But sometimes it can take quite a long time, especially if they are not given the correct information at the different police stations. We try to inform the staff at the police stations in our area to send parents who have lost their children to our offices as a first option, but this does not always happen.
“Another issue that could be seen as ‘missing children’ is that of abandonment. We receive many abandoned babies or young children.
“In the past, we were not able to trace extended family members of these babies or children.
“However, we have been more successful recently in reuniting abandoned babies and young children with biological fathers or extended family members, thereby keeping the child with the family of origin.”
Joburg Welfare is not resourced to deal with abductions.
“It’s an area that we don’t deal with as this is something that needs specialist police and legal intervention,” said Bews.
Young children are at high risk of being trafficked for sexual trade, especially because they are trusting and are accustomed to follow instructions from an adult. So if an adult tells them to get into a car because they are going to take them back to their house, the child will do so.
“They also don’t have the strength to fight back. Children are, unfortunately, seen as appealing by those who buy illicit sex. The numbers of children trafficked into the sex trade is not known because it is an illegal act.”
Trafficking in general, of adults and children, is a worldwide phenomenon and requires specialised and co-ordinated action and laws for prevention and intervention, Bews says.