Innocence lost - forever!

World Cup Sex Trafficking Fears by Lynette Johns

Weekend Argus, 24th October 2009

Thousands of sex tourists are expected to be among the half a million visitors to South Africa during the World Cup next year, and there are fears that children will be abducted by trafficking rings.

Professor Susan Kreston says the US, Australia and the UK, Germany and Nigeria are where most of the sex tourists come from. She said there could be as many as 5 000 people who would pay to have sex with children during the month-long event.

Kreston is a Fullbright professor and research fellow at the Centre for Psychology and law at the University of the Free State. She was speaking at The Centre for the Book yesterday at a ‘roundtable’ organised by child rights group Molo Songololo.

Kreston hoped that the Prevention And Combating of Trafficking In Persons Bill would become law before the World Cup. She said traffickers would advertise bogus jobs in major cities, some of them connected to the World Cup, and the successful applicants would find themselves trapped in a world of prostitution.

Children most at risk included orphans, children from child-headed households, poor children and those living in rural and informal settlements. She said the children would often be initiated into the work by being gang-raped, held captive and moved from city to city so that they did not form any relationships with NGOs or people who could help them. They were also moved around the country because clients liked ‘fresh meat’, Kreton said.

Patrick Solomons of Molo Songololo said there would be 12 million children on holiday during the World Cup, and they would want to go where the action was, near stadiums and fan sites. “They will be at risk,” Solomons said.

Kreston said sex tourists often used conferences, workshops and major events as ‘facades of respectability. At the end of the day they go and find street kids.”

Sex tourists often also knew how to contact underground travel agencies which would ‘arrange children to the client’s specifications”. South Africa was a premier destination for sex tourists who found it easy to blend in because of the high number of tourists in the country.

780 cases of rape reported daily - that is only 7% of ACTUAL rapes in this country!

Some 40,000 rape cases have been brought before the magistrates' courts of South Africa between June 2008 and July this year but only a tenth of that number ended in convictions, Justice and Constitutional Development Minister Jeff Radebe has said.

"A total of 39,946 new rape cases were added to the rolls of magistrates' courts in all nine provinces in South Africa between July 1, 2008 and the end of June this year,"” Justice Minister Radebe told parliament on October 8 in a written report. KwaZulu-Natal courts recorded the highest number with over 7 000 cases during the period under review, Radebe said.

He said that this is an average of over 780 new cases nationally each working day. "Over the last year, the highest numbers of rape matters appearing in courts were in KwaZulu-Natal, which enrolled 7 278 cases, followed by Western Cape, which enrolled 6 411. Northern Cape enrolled the least number of cases at 1 462," Radebe said.

Radebe said a breakdown of the cases by age showed the majority of rapes were perpetrated by young adults, aged 21 to 30. According to reports, South Africa has one of the highest rates of rape in the world. It is said that a woman born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped than learning how to read.

This country also is said to have the highest incidences of child and baby rape in the world. The latest crime statistics showed 71,500 sexual offences were reported to police between March 2008 and March 2009, a 12 percent increase on the previous year. The government said that increase could be partly attributed to the inclusion of attacks on men. The last police rape statistics, which date from 2008, showed 132 cases of rape were reported per day countrywide - a figure activists believe to be a fraction of the real number of rapes.

South African President Jacob Zuma has taken a tough line on violent crime since being inaugurated in May 2009. Zuma's new police commissioner Bheki Cele has vowed to crack down on robbers, but has not proposed any specific measures around gender violence.