Children trafficked from Mozambique to South Africa

NGO Amazing Grace Children’s Home is discovering that the highway between Maputo in Mozambique and Johannesburg in South Africa is a major route for trafficked children. The children’s home in Malelane, a major border crossing, which was launched with money from the international child-welfare agency Terre des Hommes in 2003 is at the frontline of caring for trafficked children;
“Around 15 new children who have either escaped or been dumped by the traffickers along the Maputo corridor are placed in our care every month. So, if that is the number falling through the cracks, then many, many more are being trafficked,” said Vusi Ndukuya from Amazing Grace Children’s Home.
“The AGCH is close to the Lebombo border post between South Africa and Mozambique, where much of the business of child trafficking goes on. It is complex and involves all sorts of people: officials to get people across the borders and drivers to transport them.
“Once the trafficked children who arrive here trust us, and they are not too traumatised, they open up and reveal stories that are awful in most cases. Some of them had been forced into labour, while others were used as sex slaves,” He said.
Margie de Monchy from UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency said;
“From what I know of the problem in South Africa, slave traders use the country’s cities as a transit point to Europe, or as a marketplace. Often the rural kids who are taken advantage of are offered the chance of an education, or a shot at a better life, so … they willingly go with the traffickers, but once they get to South Africa they become bonded. I know of instances in which they have been told they need up to US$14,000 to buy their freedom, which they never have, so they are forced into labour or the sex industry,”
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