The role of Gender

Two models can explain the complex processes of trafficking: ‘hard trafficking’ and ‘soft trafficking.’ In the former model, trafficking takes place due to coercion, fraud, abduction and deception, largely from working places of children in the worst forms of child labour. In the later model, children, girls in particular, are seen as commodity that can be bought and sold. ‘Soft trafficking’ seems to take place with the consent or complicity of parents from some remote and poor localities. But it is also clear that daughters or women have almost no control over decisions affecting them.

Girls are affected disproportionately, and are trafficked in particular for commercial sexual exploitation and child domestic labour. Very often parents are forced to send their daughters to work somewhere else in order to make her help to repay family debts. These circumstances demonstrate the involuntary ways of how girls and women are becoming a commodity of organized or loosely organised criminal traffickers. Trafficking networks perform three types of actions: they recruit women and children in any country of the region and traffic them to South Africa for exploiting them in brothels. Different people perform each of these actions based on division of labour that guarantees the smooth running of the operation. The promise of a good job is the most commonly practiced form of deception used to entice girls and women across the borders. The traffickers have established good linkages between different cities and countries where they operate.

Obscure beliefs like ‘sex with virgin’ will cure sexual dysfunctions, etc. increase the vulnerability of children, especially the girl child. Children are trafficked for sexual exploitation because of the belief that they have lesser chances of being HIV and AIDS carriers. Studies point out that the age of the girls being trafficked to South Africa is declining and the demand for virgin girls is increasing, since clients seem to believe that children have fewer chances to contract this disease.