In 1837 slavery was abolished across the British Empire. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. And on 10 December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
"No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms."
If only this were true.
According to the US government's 2009 Trafficking In Persons Report, at least 800 000 people are trafficked annually across international borders. This figure does not even begin to touch on the number of people who are trafficked within countries.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimates that global human trafficking is worth between $7-billion and $12-billion annually, making it the third most profitable criminal activity after trade in narcotics and arms.
Proudly South African?
And South Africa is by no means exempt. South Africa is commonly regarded as the primary destination for persons trafficked in the Southern African region. It is also used as a transit point for persons being trafficked from one destination to another. Over and above this, internal trafficking — of South Africans within South Africa's borders — is rife.
According to the US's most recent Trafficking in Persons Report (2009):
- Women and girls from Thailand, Congo, India, China, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are trafficked into South Africa for commercial sexual exploitation or domestic servitude.
- Organised traffickers from China bring victims from Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland into Johannesburg.
- Men from China and Taiwan are trafficked to mobile sweatshop factories in Chinese enclaves in South Africa.
- Organised criminal groups, including Nigerian, Chinese, Eastern European syndicates and local gangs, facilitate trafficking into and within South Africa.
- South African children are largely trafficked within the country from poor rural areas to urban centres such as Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Bloemfontein. Girls are used for commercial sexual exploitation and domestic servitude, while boys are used for forced street vending, begging, crime and agriculture.
Based on the cases with which it has dealt (25 000 victims globally), the IOM estimates that of all persons trafficked, approximately one third are children. Although commercial sexual exploitation is the form of human trafficking most commonly talked about, domestic servitude and forced labour are also major forms of exploitation.
Life is cheap
According to Mariam Khokhar, programme manager for irregular migration and counter-trafficking at the IOM, South Africa's informal settlements and rural areas are the main recruitment areas. The reason for this is obvious — poor and desperate people are automatically more vulnerable to trafficking.
"There are different means of recruiting victims, all of which are founded on deception or coercion," says Khokhar. "Our research, as well as interaction with victims we have assisted in this region, indicates that victims are recruited with job offers from an acquaintance, known individual in the community, or even a printed advertisement. Victims have also been abducted from their communities by traffickers."
Based on anecdotal evidence, a 2008 IOM study into internal trafficking in South Africa estimates that individuals, who are often sold repeatedly (particularly in the sexual exploitation trade), can be sold for anything between R250 and R3500.
Having been recruited and sold, it becomes very difficult for the victims of trafficking to escape the cycle of trafficking.
Drugs, debt-bondage and violence
"Traffickers use various control mechanisms to ensure that victims do not escape. One such means is debt-bondage where a victim is informed they owe a debt to the trafficker for services rendered. The victim is expected to pay off the debt and at the slightest opportunity the already-inflated debt increases. For example, if the victim falls ill and is unable to render services, they are fined and the debt increases," says Khokhar.
"Traffickers also use physical violence as a means of subduing their victims. Threats of harm on the victim and their family and friends is another means of control, this is reinforced in instances where the trafficker is known to the victim and her family."
On top of this, the victim is usually isolated from any sort of support network — their new environment is generally geographically and, at times, linguistically, foreign. Furthermore, victims who are forced into prostitution have, by the very nature of South African law, become criminals themselves.
"Victims are often forced to take drugs as a means of making them compliant and dependent on the trafficker. Traffickers also confiscate the identity documents of the victim to ensure that victims do not run away... An illegal status in the country of destination, and threats of police deportation and arrest, are also used by the trafficker when the case involves cross-border trafficking."
2009 Trafficking in Persons Report Department of State - (Read the full report here.)
The study, which has been published annually since 2000, doubles as a progress report on governments' efforts to enforce laws against trafficking and ranks countries based on their commitment to tackling the issue. The report divides participating countries into three tiers according to an assessment of the extent to which their governments prosecute, prevent and protect victims from trafficking. (Tier 1 countries show the most effort in combatting trafficking, while Tier 3 countries show the least.) Tier 3 countries that do not comply with the minimum standards face sanctions. Unsurprisingly, developed nations in the 2009 report dominated the top tier, while Iran and North Korea joined half a dozen sub-Saharan African countries in Tier 3.
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