IOL: Child sex slaves 'easy to find'

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Keith Ross
February 01 2010 at 07:45AM

It is "terrifyingly easy" to find children trapped in prostitution in South Africa, says an American author, Benjamin Skinner, who has researched the problem in this country.

He said it was also easy to buy child "sex slaves", some of whom were on offer in South Africa for as little as R45 each.

Skinner is the award-winning author of a book, A Crime so Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern Day Slavery.

He also recently wrote an article for Time magazine, South Africa's New Slave Trade and the Campaign to Stop It, about children forced into prostitution.

The article was researched during a visit to South Africa, where he spoke to teenage victims and also to some of the "monstrous traffickers" who sold them into sex slavery.

He has now spoken of his experiences when taking part in the SAfm Radio discussion programme, the After Eight Debate, on the issue of human trafficking.

Skinner said it was hard to gauge the extent of the traffic in South Africa.

"These are not people who stand in line, raise their hands and wait for a census to be taken," he said.

"This is a hidden population. Unless there is aggressive police work to go out and find this population and protect them, they will not be found and will continue to suffer in silence."

He said some organisations close to the problem had put the number of child prostitutes in South Africa at about 38 000, but the number could be higher.

"When I hit the ground in South Africa this summer I knew I could not go out to every single child held in prostitution. What I could do was go out and find a few and tell their stories."

He did some research in Bloemfontein, at the invitation of Pastor Andre Lombard, of the Christian Revival Church, who has been working on a project to help child prostitutes.

Together they interviewed child prostitutes, one of whom, a 15-year-old, was dying in a Bloemfontein hospice.

"She had full-blown tuberculosis, full-blown Aids and was about three months' pregnant. And she died a week later. That is the end game for these children."

Skinner even posed as a potential buyer and spoke to a child trafficker, named only as Jude, a Nigerian.

Jude promised to get him two 15-year-old girls for R45 each.

"I made it clear I wanted them to work for me in a sex club, in a prostitution club, in a brothel.

"At a certain point he said: 'I will be pulling these girls off trash heaps where they are currently digging to survive around Johannesburg.'"

Skinner said two of the sex slaves he interviewed told of how they were duped into coming to the city and then forced to work as prostitutes.

"They were beaten if they did not perform to standard or did not come with the minimum amount of money they were required to earn every evening."

He was led in his research by Pastor Lombard, who told the debate that his church had launched a project in 2006 to help the girls.

"We have seen girls from the age of 13 being exploited, being sold by people."

Lombard said some were lured by job offers in newspapers and then forced into prostitution.

"They have a target they have to meet every night. If they do not make that target they will get the consequences."

He said there were 300 to 400 prostitutes on the streets of Bloemfontein at night and 50 to 70 were under 18.


IOL: Child sex slaves 'easy to find'

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