Horror tales of sex workers

Ngcobo residents gasp at stories of trafficking

RESIDENTS of Ngcobo gasped in horror while others could not hold back tears as two young Eastern Cape women told how they were lured into the world of prostitution with false promises of a scholarship and a good life.

This was at the town’s Indoor Sport Centre yesterday during a Trafficking in Persons Awareness Campaign hosted by members of the Eastern Cape Hawks.

After being forced into sex work and plied with drugs, the young victims were eventually saved by the Hawks.

The media was asked not to take any pictures of the victims, who openly shared their stories with the crowd.

With tears streaming from her eyes, one of the women, who has penned a book about her ordeal, told a shocked crowd that she had been lured into the human trafficking underworld after being promised a scholarship to further her studies in New York. But that was not to be. Instead she was taken to Johannesburg, where she was forced to become a sex worker.

The Daily Dispatch was told that the woman was only 15 in 2011, when she became a victim of human trafficking.

She told the audience that she had been forced to have sex with up to 15 men a day.

She said about 15 of her friends, forced into sex work like her, had been killed by their captors.

A fellow survivor, who was only 21 when she was forced into prostitution, said she had met a man at a nightclub who had promised her the good life.

But when they went to his house, all they found was a group of girls.

“He asked the girls to show me how to smoke what they were smoking and I was told I would have to sell my body in the streets,” she said.

Breaking into tears, she narrated how her first night as a sex worker had turned into horror for her as she was assaulted by a client.

Another horrific story narrated was of a 14-year-old Ngcobo girl who was abducted by four men as she was on her way home from school.

Now 36, the woman was beaten and raped on her first night by her new husband, who was around 38 at the time.

She ended up fleeing her marital home and is now both working and trying to finish her matric.

The practice of forcing underage girls into marriage has been made illegal in South Africa’s new Trafficking in Persons Act.

Hawks provincial spokeswoman Captain Anelisa Feni told the Dispatch that human trafficking was a reality even in the Eastern Cape.

“Drugs and trafficking often go together as they [perpetrators] get their victims hooked on drugs,” she added.

Advocate Nolitha Madiba from the National Prosecuting Authority told the crowd that people involved in human trafficking often worked in syndicates.

But sometimes those involved were people known to the victims.

She warned the audience that “if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is”. —