World Cup could spark South Africa child trafficking boom

As South Africa counts down the 500 days until it hosts the World Cup, the football festival brings with it a seedier side. Fears are mounting that it could create a market for child trafficking.

The world is watching in anticipation as stadiums go up, roads are built or upgraded, and a country once faced with overwhelming odds draws closer to becoming the first African nation to hold the biggest sporting spectacle on the planet.

One of the most positive spin-offs for the country will be the massive influx of foreigners destined for South Africa's sunny shores, and the investment they will bring with them. But criminals will also cash in. “Stories are already circulating that young girls are being brought in and kept in safe houses where they are being groomed as prostitutes for the games in 2010,” professor Carol Allias of the University of South Africa told a BBC correspondent. Prof Allias, who has recently put together a report on child trafficking, said: "There's usually an increase in demand for prostitution during international sporting events. This was the case during the Olympic Games in Athens [and] the World Cup in Berlin in 2006,” she noted.

The practice is especially rife in Mpumalanga, a province near Mozambique and Swaziland. Strangers, or sometimes relatives, illegally take children from their homes and send them to cities where they are used for prostitution, pornography or hard labour.

The story of 18-year-old Carlos is a common one. Carlos’s parents died when he was seven. While in Mozambique, a stranger befriended him, promising to take him to South Africa where he said he would have a better life. But Carlos ended up working on a farm where he says he was beaten and not paid. "I wanted to be like one of those who have a better future, who are living at home with their parents," he told a BBC correspondent. "This man told me that we should go. And I took my bags and we left for South Africa."

With the World Cup around the corner, there are concerns that the practice will increase. Aid agencies have been voicing their worries about the problem for two years, but say it seemed very little was being done about it and there was little sense of urgency.

Young women are also victims, The Southern African Development Community (SADC) suggests. Women and children were disappearing into the clutches of criminal gangs, only to surface in brothels and "massage parlours" in major South African cities, news website allafrica.com, said back in September.

As part of “6 villages for 2006”, SOS Children’s joint 2006 World Cup campaign with FIFA, an eighth SOS Children's Village was opened in late 2006 in Rustenburg. The ten family houses in the village in South Africa’s North West province are slowly being filled with vulnerable children from the country’s mining area.

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By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children