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Elucidating the reality of human trafficking in South Africa

12 October 2020 | Story Nonsindiso Qwabe | Photo Anja Aucamp

How big is the human trafficking problem in South Africa? Whereas most crimes are generally reported to the police, trafficking is not, mainly because victims fear retaliation. Thus, exact statistics on human trafficking are not available anywhere in the world. But one thing is for sure; trafficking is an indisputable and systemic reality in South Africa. This is according to Prof Beatri Kruger, Research Fellow in the Centre for Human Rights at the University of the Free State.

Prof Kruger’s research on human trafficking spans a decade, and she said as human trafficking gets more public attention, more cases are coming to the fore. “This is a good thing, because if you know the enemy and the modus operandi, you won’t be misled easily.”

Prof Kruger said for the past five years, South Africa has been classified as a country of origin, transit, and destination for trafficking by the annual US Trafficking in Persons Reports.

An increasing number of trafficking convictions

What this means is that victims are trafficked from South Africa to other countries; foreign victims are moved through the country to other areas for exploitation, while foreign victims are also brought from elsewhere in the world to the country as their final destination.

“The trafficking reality is not based on speculation. We have solid evidence that there is a very serious problem,” Prof Kruger said. According to police statistics, a significant number of 2 132 cases of human trafficking were reported to the SAPS under the current Trafficking Act from 2015 to 2017. Also, apart from five empirical doctorate studies, this reality is further confirmed by an increasing number of trafficking convictions in our courts.

Prof Kruger said these convictions provide significant insights into human trafficking in South Africa. Firstly, victims are seldom being kidnapped and taken by force. Instead, traffickers prefer to trick and trap victims by misleading them with false promises of a better life. Court cases exposed that many are misled by fabricated well-paid jobs or educational opportunities. The cases further reveal how traffickers submit their victims to various forms of exploitation. Aldina dos Santos [S v Dos Santos [2018 1 SACR 20 (GP)] was sentenced to life imprisonment for cunningly transporting Mozambican girls to her Gauteng residence, where they were forced to use drugs and perform sexual services to multiple paying clients. The court further imposed eight life sentences on Loyd Mabuza [S v Lloyd Mabuza 2018 2 SACR 54 (GP)] for holding four Mozambican girls between the ages of 10 and 16 captive as sex slaves for three years in the Sabi district. In S v Matini [case no. RC 123/2013 EC)], several South African victims, including mentally challenged girls, were sexually exploited in a brothel near Port Elizabeth. The two female traffickers in S v Seleso [case no. SS45/2018 (GJ)], who forced an orphaned girl into prolonged online sexual exploitation, were each sentenced to 19 life sentences. Convictions were also secured in other forms of exploitation, such as labour trafficking. In Mpumalanga, a boy of only six years old was forced into child labour. In the Pinetown area, children were provided at a price in illegal adoption scams: some children were sold for up to R15 000. Babies were also commodified and traded – in KwaZulu-Natal, a mother even advertised her baby on Gumtree for R5 000. “In most cases, there were either multiple victims, multiple traffickers, or both, and multiple places of exploitation.”

Prof Kruger said there is still a need for more empirical research on the prevalence of all forms of human trafficking. She is currently involved in a comprehensive research project focusing on human trafficking in South Africa.

Assisting the public

Despite the challenges to combat trafficking, several milestones are also worth celebrating, she said. There is a toll-free 24/7 national human trafficking hotline available to assist the public, the National Freedom Network consists of vetted individuals and more than 70 organisations joining forces to combat trafficking, while important counter-trafficking information is available at www.nationalfreedomnetwork.co.za, and successful prosecutions are increasing, to name just a few.

Tips to keep you safe:

-Do not believe everything you read on social media. Evaluate and verify the source, time, and date before believing it or sending it on to others.
-Have a code that you share with your family and friends that you can use to alert them if you are in danger.
- Remember that there is safety in numbers. Do not walk or jog alone in secluded areas.
- If a trafficker attempts to grab you, make a scene so that other people can notice.
- Alert especially students to employment scams – verify job offers by calling the Trafficking Hotline.
- Report any suspicion of trafficking to the police, and also to the Trafficking Hotline.

If you need information or help, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline on +27 0800 222 777

News Archive

Is milk really so well-known, asks UFS’s Prof. Osthoff

2011-03-17

Prof. Garry Osthoff
Photo: Stephen Collett

Prof. Garry Osthoff opened a whole new world of milk to the audience in his inaugural lecture, Milk: the well-known (?) food, in our Department of Microbial, Biochemical and Food Biotechnology of the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences.

Prof. Osthoff has done his research in protein chemistry, immuno-chemistry and enzymology at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria and post-doctoral research at the Bowman-Grey School of Medicine, North Carolina, USA. That was instrumental in establishing food chemistry at the university.

He is involved in chemical aspects of food, with a focus on dairy science and technology. He is also involved in the research of cheese processing as well as milk evolution and concentrated on milk evolution in his lecture. Knowledge of milk from dairy animals alone does not provide all the explanations of milk as food.

Some aspects he highlighted in his lecture were that milk is the first food to be utilised by young mammals and that it is custom-designed for each species. “However, mankind is an opportunist and has found ways of easy access to food by the practice of agriculture, where plants as well as animals were employed or rather exploited,” he said.

The cow is the best-known milk producer, but environmental conditions forced man to select other animals. In spite of breeding selection, cattle seem not to have adapted to the most extreme conditions such as high altitudes with sub-freezing temperatures, deserts and marshes.

Prof. Osthoff said the consumption of the milk as an adult is not natural; neither is the consumption of milk across species. This practice of mankind may often have consequences, when signs of malnutrition or diseases are noticed. Two common problems are an allergy to milk and lactose intolerance.

Allergies are normally the result of an immune response of the consumer to the foreign proteins found in the milk. In some cases it might help to switch from one milk source to another, such as switching from cow’s milk to goat’s milk.

Prof. Osthoff said lactose intolerance – the inability of adult humans to digest lactose, the milk sugar – is natural, as adults lose that ability to digest lactose. The symptoms of the condition are stomach cramps and diarrhoea. This problem is mainly found in the warmer climates of the world. This could be an indication of early passive development of dairy technology. In these regions milk could not be stored in its fresh form, but in a fermented form, in which case the lactose was pre-digested by micro-organisms, and the human population never adapted to digesting lactose in adulthood.

According to Prof. Osthoff, it is basically the lactose in milk that has spurred dairy technology. Its fermentation has resulted in the development of yoghurts and all the cheeses that we know. In turn, the intolerance to lactose has spurred a further technological solution: lactose-free milk is currently produced by pre-digestion of lactose with enzymes.

It was realised that the milks and products from different species differed in quality aspects such as keeping properties and taste. It was also realised that the nutritional properties differed as well as their effects on health. One example is the mentioned allergy against cow’s milk proteins, which may be solved by the consumption of goat’s milk. The nutritional benefits and technological processing of milk aroused an interest in more information, and it was realised that the information gained from human milk and that of the few domesticated species do not provide a complete explanation of the properties of milk as food. Of the 250 species of milk which have been studied, only the milk of humans and a few domesticated dairy animals has been studied in detail.

Media Release
15 March 2011
Issued by: Lacea Loader
Director: Strategic Communication
Tel: 051 401 2584
Cell: 083 645 2454
E-mail: news@ufs.ac.za

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