|
SA 'hub of child sex market'
18/02/2003 22:55 - (SA)
Johannesburg - South Africa has become a market for children sold into prostitution from Africa, Europe and the Far East, a report to the UN Commission on Human Rights said.
Children from Angola, Mozambique, Senegal, Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda, Eastern Europe, Thailand and China are either being lured or kidnapped here in unknown numbers to become prostitutes on the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town, a report by experts to the commission said.
Angolan, Congolese and Nigerian criminal rings are the ones responsible for much of the trafficking, but criminal elements from Bulgaria, Thailand, China and Russia are also said to be involved.
The report was compiled by UN officials who visited South Africa last year to investigate the high incidents of abuse, rape and child prostitution in the country.
The group found that hunger, poverty and the apartheid legacy all impacted on crimes involving children.
"The very desperate food shortages in countries bordering South Africa is contributing to an increase in trafficking of children," the report said. About 15 million people are affected by a hunger crisis in southern Africa.
The report also found that lack of public freedoms and equality under the racist apartheid regime which ended in 1994 with the country's first all-race elections, was often among the causes of abuse.
Desperate conditions
"Hatred has accumulated. Violence has accumulated. The traditional relations of family harmony were seriously damaged by decades of oppression and contempt, and their present manifestations in devious forms are shocking," the report said.
Often desperate conditions have sometimes lead parents to sell their own children into prostitution.
"...In many cases the parents actually encourage or force the child to earn money this way," the report said.
Other children, orphaned by Aids, sell their bodies for sex in order to survive. About one in nine South Africans is living with HIV/Aids and 662 000 children under the age of 14 have lost one or both parents to the disease.
Young girls are often especially vulnerable, according to the report. Children are also sometimes targeted by HIV positive adults who believe that sex with a minor could cure them of the disease.
Last year the South African Human Rights Commission found that almost one-third of children in the country had been sexually abused.
Despite this, UN investigators found there is no adequate framework in the country for children who have been abused or are in need of treatment for Aids.
|
News
