Child trafficking and children in South Africa’s sex trade : evidence, undercounting and obfuscations

Author: van der Watt, Marcel

Abstract: Few social phenomena in contemporary South Africa have been subject to so much speculation and raised so many unanswered questions as the country’s child trafficking ‘problem’. The exact scope of child trafficking in South Africa will remain elusive, whilst fearmongering is unlikely to leave our dining room tables and social media spaces. The concept of child trafficking itself is a greasy and contested one, open to misuse, sensation and even discounting. With due consideration to the absence of an unambiguous statistical knowledge base, this article considers sceptics’ assertion of only anecdotal or “little evidence” to substantiate the problem and assesses what insights can be gleaned from available sources. The article focuses on child trafficking and children in the sex trade. A complex and nuanced perspective replaces number counting and simplicity, with the author’s proximity to the study phenomena over the past 18 years serving to string the disconnected ‘pieces’ together. South Africa’s Prevention and Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act 7 of 2013 is discussed as the yardstick for determining what is trafficking and what is not, followed by an overview of available literature and media reports. Available police data is presented and selected successfully prosecuted cases briefly discussed. Findings indicate that some researchers’ use of truncated definitions of Trafficking in Persons (TIP) undercounts the prevalence of TIP among research participants and that claims by TIP sceptics of “little evidence to substantiate” the prevalence of child trafficking and children in South Africa’s sex trade are misleading. The complex nature and malleability of child trafficking and children in the sex trade are underscored and factors contributing to constraining the measurement of the problem discussed. Woven together, literature, research, media reports, academic studies, police investigations (closed and ongoing) and prosecutions (successful and unsuccessful) over the past three decades – contextualised within South Africa’s complex socio-cultural vulnerability landscape – indicate that child trafficking and children in South Africa’s sex trade cannot be ignored as a systemic South African problem.

Keywords: child prostitution, child trafficking, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, trafficking in persons