More reports of child trafficking in South Africa

There have been more reports of the trafficking of women and children into forced prostitution and forced labour in South Africa. Babalwa Makawula, a co-founder of the New Life Centre, an outreach centre in Berea, said;
“The problem we face is that a lot of these children have pimps who lock them up the whole day and only let them out at night to work,”
“What we are seeing is a large number of girls from the rural areas of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu Natal who are being trafficked to Joburg by their friends, who tell them that there are plenty of jobs here.”
“When they get here they find that there are no jobs and are forced into prostitution. In some cases, the older girls and even their friends become their pimps,”
NGOs in Johannesburg estimate that there are around 2000 underage prostitutes working in the Hillbrow and Berea areas alone. In addition to this there is a problem with children being trafficked into forced labour, a problem which is difficult to deal with in the Sub-Saharan Africa context where millions of children are economically active.