By Muzhinga Kankinda
Child trafficking is a fraction of the human trafficking industry. The UN defines It as the recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring, and receiving of kidnapped child for the purpose of slavery, forced labor and exploitation. Although date is scarce, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 10,000 children are trafficked each year which implies that 50,000 children are trafficked in five years, making it 100,000 in 10 years and 500,000 in 50 years. As such this is a vice that calls for alarm and immediate positive response from stakeholders.
However, despite legal enforcement efforts to generally curb the vice of human trafficking in Africa, a majority of Southern African countries are considered to be recruitment bases where men, women and children are obtained. These countries also serve as transit countries through which traffickers transport their victims en route to their destination countries.
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), victims are transported to South Africa, a country considered to be the primary destination for trafficked persons in the region; and Zambia is no exception as it is considered to be a source, transit, and destination country for children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation to work as farm labourers, sex workers and child soldiers.
Considering the fact that child trafficking is perpetrated for both international and national agendas, there is evidence that suggests that the most common form of trafficking in Zambia is internal trafficking of children for purposes of domestic labour, farm labour and commercial sexual exploitation. This is due to the increased levels of poverty and unemployment in the respective country which create an opportunity for traffickers to deceive women and children into accepting false offers they make without realizing the full extent of their future with these bad people or the conditions in which they will work in. For instance, child prostitution has been existent in Zambia’s urban centers, serving as evidence of the internal operations of child traffickers with records showing that this vice is often encouraged or facilitated by relatives or acquaintances of the victims.
Meanwhile, a prodigious number of Zambian child laborers, particularly those in the agriculture, domestic service and fishing sectors are also targeted by internal traffickers. For instance, records have shown that financially over-stretched households in Zambia are in fore-front to pull orphaned children out of school or deny them opportunities of acquiring an education, making these children work for long hours with little or no food or alternatively discriminating against them, sexually abusing them and sometimes, sending them to live with distant relatives against promises of education of which they eventually end up as full time domestic labourers in farms and other workplaces.
This has been rendered as the single largest problem relating to trafficking in Zambia at the moment in that research shows that people who traffick their family and community members lack knowledge and awareness on the risks of trafficking. Hence, posing a real risk of escalating the levels of child trafficking operations because traffickers often take advantage of people’s ignorance to lure people into supporting them in trafficking humans especially when it comes to internal trafficking.
In the same vein, research on child trafficking has shown that victims are often lured into the snare through promises of false employment and are trafficked to South Africa via Zimbabwe for sexual exploitation; and to Europe via Malawi. As such, Zambia is a transit point for regional trafficking of children, particularly from Angola to Namibia for agricultural labor; and from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to South Africa while, both Malawian and Mozambican children are occasionally trafficked to Zambia for forced agricultural labor.
Meanwhile, the effects of child trafficking on victims as well as society in general cannot be ignored because they are a depiction of the adage, “if you are not infected, you are affected”. This comes into light with the effects that come with trafficking children for sexual exploitation in that victims are at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections like Syphilis; and of spreading the diseases to people living normal lives in their communities. Further, children often become retarded due to the physical and emotional abuse they receive during the process of being trafficked from their homes. Most children especially girls are sexually abused and this causes tryna and PTSD. This is to say that people are trafficked in dangerous conditions and often held in circumstances that can have long-term detrimental effects on their mental and physical well-being causing trauma, retardation and social deprivation. In the same vein, child laborers end up uneducated, sickly due to heavy work with little or no no food and to a larger extent, they end up dying from hunger, disease and overworking.
Furthermore, we cannot also ignore the pain and suffering that loved one go through when their child goes missing all of a sudden.
However, with child trafficking on the rise, there has been no long-term, large-scale public awareness or education against trafficking in Zambia. According to ILO, although limited public information measures have been carried out primarily by UN agencies ILO and IOM, efforts by the Zambia Police to identify and respond to trafficking have been largely inconsistent and uncoordinated. Hence, giving an opportunity to local and international traffickers to carry out their operations easily without fear of detection or punishment while various communities in the country remain oblivious to the risks of trafficking and the plight of those who are trafficked.
As such, the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons downgraded Zambia to “Tier 2 Watchlist” in 2017 and 2020 respectively for her failure to completely deal with human trafficking challenges in general. Nonetheless, the US. State Department office has also noted that the Government of the Repulic of Zambia has made significant attempts to increase the capacity of law enforcement agencies to detect human trafficking and to provide assistance to victims through training.
In conclusion, with child and all other forms of human trafficking on the rampage, there is need to make efforts public raise awareness on human trafficking in general, including children and women who are major targets of the traffickers. This will help increase vigilance from both law enforcement and the public and create genuine strides towards strengthening an anti-human trafficking way of thinking and conduct.
As such, ILO calls for an urgent response by government to broaden national partnerships against human trafficking in Zambia through engaging potentially key change agents that are in a unique position to target dissemination of information and raising awareness to both potential trafficking victims as well as their parents or guardians in view of increasing to their resilience to trafficking and sounding a warning to potential violators.
