Johannesburg – In recent years, South Africa has become a hot spot for human traffickers. This development is backed up by spiralling human trafficking statistics.

It is no secret that a large proportion of South Africa’s population is jobless, with the unemployment rate currently standing at 35.3% in a country with a population of over 60 million.
The Covid-19 pandemic has also contributed to the rise in unemployment, as about 2 million people lost their jobs in the two years since March 2020 owing to the hard lockdowns.
To try and survive, many people might have resorted to crime, with some of them aiding potential human traffickers, as there seems to have been a rise in the number of children being trafficked, while some are being mutilated and killed.
In May, a voice note from an underage girl allegedly pimped out to foreign nationals by a young woman in Parklands, Cape Town, did the rounds on social media.
This voice note sparked conversations about how teenage girls go missing without a trace while human traffickers go unnoticed and unpunished in the country.
To shed some light on the prevalence of human trafficking, a Western Cape non-profit organisation, Stop Trafficking, has researched the issue and found that 2 million children are exploited in the sex industry annually.
The reasons for the rise in children being trafficked in and around South Africa vary, but Bianca van Aswegen, the national co-ordinator for Missing Children South Africa, said job losses and poverty have driven people to desperation – and therefore exploitation.
“There has been an increase in false job advertisements where people have fallen victim to human trafficking. Children have also become more active on social media, where criminal syndicates have been grooming and luring them.
“We have seen a rise in not only children falling victim to human trafficking, although the majority of victims in SA are children. There are different types of uses for the victim within these rings, and anyone can fall victim to human trafficking. Victims are taken for such purposes as illegal adoptions, forced labour, sexual exploitation, and organ trafficking,” Van Aswegen said.

Required:
As the Applied Research for Law Practitioners module is reaching a point of culmination, you are tasked to write a 12 – 15 page research proposal on the topic of Child Exploitation as a Form of Human Trafficking.

Research Proposal on Topic of Child Exploitation 

Background: Child exploitation for the purpose of human trafficking is a major problem worldwide. There are many ways in which time exploitation is carried out such as in the form of commercial sex, or for labour purposes. These traffickers make use of different methods in order to make children comply with their demands such as coercion or violence.