Horror of child Sex Trafficking in South Africa

Yet the World Cup and its vuvuzela-sound tracked drama hides a darker, more sordid game. While the footballers were in training, the country’s sex industry was gearing up for the influx of visitors, trafficking woman and girls into city brothels to meet the expected demand. 

Sex trafficking is a problem worldwide, an estimated 1.2million children and young people are trafficked annually, becoming victims of sexual exploitation and abuse. 

It happens in every country, from the richest to the poorest, butSouth Africa’s laws make it particularly hard to prosecute those involved. There has been an anti-trafficking bill on the books for five years, but it has yet to be made into law. 

The Body Shop is launching a petition on July 15 in conjunction with ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) to raise awareness of the problem. 

They commissioned photographer Hazel Thompson to document the work of Cape Town’s Vice Squads. She visited in April and found that an already thriving sex industry was expecting an increase in business during the World Cup. “In the week I was there we found seven confirmed cases of trafficking,” she says. “And they’re finding more and more girls every week.” 

If a football fan was looking for a “good time” after the game and asked a taxi driver to take him somewhere he could find a girl, he would most probably end up on Koeberg Road, where prostitutes tout for business on the street and then take their customers to a car or sometimes to a run-down flat. They charge less than 150 Rand (£13.50) a time.

Thompson accompanied the Vice Squad on a raid in the area and found room after room containing girls who had been drugged, slumped on beds and surrounded by piles of rotting rubbish, vomit and faeces. One girl told them that she was 19 and from Pretoria. She had been offered work in Cape Town and then tricked and forced into a brothel. 

Prostitution is illegal in South Africa but the evidence needed for prosecution is hard to come by. Brothel owners can only really be prosecuted under complicated laws against the misuse of business premises and the lack of anti-trafficking laws means the girl cannot be removed from the brothel unless she leaves of her own accord. 

“This girl told us that she had been taken but the gang that ran the place was just outside and she was too scared to come with us,” says Thompson. “It was heartbreaking. If that law had been passed we could have taken her. As it is, the Vice Squad can only remove girls if they are foreigners and don’t have the correct paperwork.” 

In the leafy Cape Town suburb of Table View there are at least 49 brothels. There sex costs around 500 Rand (£45) and the conditions the girls work in are far less squalid, but the prostitutes are still often on drugs and trafficked girls are found weekly. 

The vast majority of clients are foreigners, Japanese and Chinese businessmen or international tourists. Hardly any use condoms. 

Thompson spoke to a woman who ran one of these establishments. She said: “She told me people were asking for younger and younger girls, sometimes specifically requesting virgins. On one hand she was saying how sick this was and on another she was boasting that she was known to be able to cater to that demand.” 

Poverty makes people, especially young people, susceptible to traffickers. The common scenarios are that young women are offered a job in the city and, once they get there, forced into sex work, or else persuaded into following a man they believe to be their “boyfriend” who then restyles himself as their pimp. Drugged, beaten and broken they have no means of escape. 

There is a huge amount of money behind the sex industry, with syndicates from China or Russia often involved. Trafficking, to these people, is good business. You can only sell a trafficked drug once. A trafficked girl, on the other hand, is “reusable” for however long you can beat or drug her into submission. 

One rescued woman calling herself Jasmine was sold into prostitution by her mother at the age of 13. She told Thompson: “It’s not easy to sleep with anybody, especially if you do not know that person. It is difficult the first time, the second time and even if you do it a hundred times, it is still as bad as the first time. It still hurts you. It is degrading to you as a person, as a woman, as a mother and as somebody’s daughter.” 

Now she is no longer involved with the sex industry she has begun to gain some confidence. “I realise now that I am not just a piece of meat, I am also a person.” 

Yet for every story with a positive outcome there are thousands of women and children who are too frightened to leave. 

In 2006 there was a prostitution boom in Germany when it hosted the World Cup. Legal brothels were supplemented by girls trafficked from Eastern Europe and further afield but the laws were in place for police to crack down on the problem. 

Women are already being brought to Britain in anticipation of increased demand around the 2012 Olympics but, again, there are laws in place to deal with it – which is not to say there is not a problem. 

The Body Shop’s campaign is international, focusing on each country individually, but hopes that in South Africa’s case, international pressure can be brought to bear on the government, forcing it to pass the anti-trafficking laws.

They are encouraging people to sign an online petition at www.thebodyshop.com/stop or else visit a store to “raise your hand” against trafficking by tracing round it. Celebrities including Joanna Lumley, Sir Ben Kingsley and Twilight’s Robert Pattinson have already done so. 

It’s important that a change in law is pushed through to give the police more powers when dealing with traffickers and also that the infrastructure for helping victims is strengthened. 

Some feel that focusing on this issue at what is otherwise a time of joy for South Africa will give the country a bad name, but if pressure is applied from the international community the necessary laws could be in place by the end of the year. 

Until then, Thompson will remain haunted by the girl too scared of her captors to leave with the Vice Squad. “She had a huge impact on me. It was the fact we left her behind. 

“What upset me most was that the men running the place had no fear. It was easy for them, it was like they were mocking us being there. They thought they were untouchable. That was what left such a sick aftertaste. It was just cold, inhumane, and evil. And they were getting away with it.

By Clare Heal