Where have your children gone, South Africa?

David Waterboer, 14, was last seen wearing a black T-shirt, black-and-red trousers and navy blue shoes when he left his home to attend an athletics event in Concordia in Northern Cape on 7 February. He has disappeared without a trace and his family is frantic with worry.

Amahle Thabethe was eight years old when she went missing while playing with her friends outside her home in Tsakane, Gauteng, in 2019. 

The little girl, who was allegedly lured away by an unknown man, has never been found.

Her mother Nokulunga Nkosi wears a T-shirt with Amahle’s face on it every day in the hope that someone will recognise her daughter, who she believes is still alive.

Veronique Adams’ minder allegedly kidnapped her in 1989 when she was just 11 months old, leaving her five-year-old sister Melissa to comfort her identical twin Veronisha. 

Thirty-five years later, she is still missing.

But Veronisha and her mother Junice, like Amahle and David’s families, have not given up hope of finding her one day. The family has widely published photos of Veronique, alongside adult ones of Veronisha, hoping that someone, somewhere will recognise her and they will be reunited.

“As a family we believe that she’s still alive out there somewhere,” Veronisha told the Mail & Guardian this week, of her twin.

“And also because of the fact that doctors normally say that twins have a special bond and we can feel each other. 

“So, from that perspective, sometimes I get a feeling that you can’t explain. A feeling of longing for someone or something that you can’t really explain.

“Based on that, I just feel that there’s not really an option of giving up on finding her. She must be out there somewhere … someone must know something about her.”

Traditional news sites and social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok are awash with stories about missing children reported to the South African Police Service (SAPS) — such as the cases of David, Amahle and Veronique.

According to the SAPS Missing Persons Bureau data, an average of 1 697 children have been reported missing every year over a 10-year period, equating to about one report every five hours.

Scores of support groups have been created for the families of the thousands of missing children who still hope against hope for the day the phone might ring with good news.

However, criminology experts say, in many instances, relatives themselves are involved in the sale of children to traffickers, or other forms of exploitation, a tragedy compounded due to the widespread job losses caused by the Covid-19 lockdowns.

Prosecutors are making a similar argument in the case of missing Saldanha Bay girl Joslin Smith, whose mother Kelly Smith has been on trial with two men on charges of kidnapping and human trafficking in relation to the six-year-old’s disappearance in February last year.

Police Minister Senzo Mchunu’s written response to questions posed in parliament on 21 February indicated that 188 children went missing in South Africa between 1 October and 31 December last year. Of these, 102 had been found, while 86 were still missing.

Topping the list of provinces where the most children were reported missing were the Western Cape with 56, followed by the Free State with 42, Gauteng (38), KwaZulu-Natal (19), North West (15), Mpumalanga (9), Eastern Cape and Limpopo (2). 

The provinces with the highest number of children still missing without a trace were Gauteng (32), the Western Cape (16), KwaZulu-Natal (14), North West (12) and Eastern Cape (7).

The actual number of missing children is believed to be far higher than those reported to the police, said Bianca van Aswegen, a criminologist and national coordinator at Missing Children South Africa.

This is because, in many cases, relatives or people known to them are involved in the disappearance and therefore they do not report it.

“Statistics really only give a general indication of the problem. There are many cases that go unreported — people living in rural areas, people that have a lack of trust with our police system. 

“And then we’ve also got the cases of human trafficking where children are being sold off by their own families, without being reported,” Van Aswegen said.

“We have seen … cases where family members or family friends are involved with actually selling off their own children — or exploiting them themselves. For instance, we see children standing on street corners begging.

“Those children still have homes but they are being exploited by their own families, standing on street corners begging for money to bring an extra income into the household. 

“We’ve also seen families using girls for sexual exploitation.”

Communities need to get more proactive in reporting missing children, Van Aswegen said.

“You see a woman that’s pregnant and say 11 months later, ‘There’s no baby. What happened to the child?’ 

“Or there’s a family that had three children and, a month later, there’s only one left. What happened to the other two children? 

“But people aren’t looking for these signs. They’re not reporting.”

The Covid-19 lockdowns led to a rise in the human trafficking and exploitation of children due to job losses, poverty and unwanted pregnancies linked to the pandemic.

“Lockdown escalated everything because human trafficking is a low-risk, high-reward crime.

“If the demand is there, it will never stop. It’s all money driven,” Van Aswegen said.

“Firstly, it’s the most vulnerable in society, the majority of the time, that’s taken. 

“It’s low risk with no one reporting those people as missing, especially when families sell their own children. It’s an absolute low risk, but it’s a high-reward crime, because there’s a lot of money involved.”

In the case of Joslin, Van Aswegen said she could not understand why people who had allegedly heard Kelly Smith stating that she planned to sell her children did not immediately report her to the police.

It did not make sense, she added, that a sangoma, as alleged recently during Smith’s trial, would want just her eyes and skin for “muti” — as this was also not ordinarily a cultural practice in the Western Cape.

“It doesn’t sit right with me. I’m trying to wrap my head around this whole thing because, specifically, when it comes to muti murders, they will not just take or buy a child for their eyes and skin. 

“That sounds more like organ trafficking, human trafficking, but sangomas aren’t involved with organ trafficking which would be, for example, for a person who needs a kidney,” Van Aswegen said.

“It’s the richest of the richest people who are willing to pay to save a loved one’s life by buying a kidney and the victims are the poorest of the poor, desperate to sell off a kidney to just get money.”

She added that Missing Children SA did not get reports about child trafficking specifically for body parts. 

Another sad reality is that families often become the target of extortionists claiming to have information about a missing child’s whereabouts.

“Even with the Joslin case, right in the beginning, we had so many people calling. If it’s not a psychic, it’s a person saying they want money, they know where Joslin is. 

“For three weeks straight, my phone rang non-stop through the night,” Van Aswegen said.

The question arises — are South Africa’s laws adequate, and the police sufficiently equipped, to fight the scourge and to find the children?

“They are trying their best but they’re over-mandated. The Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences unit handles all the children’s cases, whether it’s missing children or sexual abuse related, but they really are over-mandated with all the cases that land on their table,” Van Aswegen said, adding that the organised crime units that focus on human trafficking are also understaffed and overburdened.

“We need to expand those units. We need to also give our SAPS regular training on human trafficking, on children going missing, so they can keep up with the trends and the modus operandi of these syndicates,” she said.

University of Cape Town Centre of Criminology senior research associate Simon Hopewell said that, on paper, the country’s laws were “fairly well developed from an administrative perspective”.

However, what remains an issue is the procedural enactment and safeguarding of the legal framework in the daily lives of people, he added.

“This is a far wider issue, however, and has been widely documented in various places — South Africa has great laws but it remains a challenge to ensure they are felt and enacted.”

Many missing children and trafficking cases require advanced intelligence networks and active, rather than reactive, policing measures.

“Intelligence has the ability to do this but remains hamstrung by the ongoing internal divisions, and leadership battles within the division, that have plagued it for the last few years,” Hopewell said.

“SAPS needs to deal with these internal issues — and, to its credit, has finally begun to do so — so its capabilities can be focused outwards towards pre-emptively engaging with identified threats to prevent these types of cases occurring.”

He reiterated that the SAPS Missing Persons Bureau data only covers cases that are reported to the police and that the actual number of children missing and/or abducted was unknown and probably significantly larger.

“Broader issues around trust of the police and fear of repercussions undermine reporting generally,” Hopewell said.

“The data is not particularly granular, but over an 18-year span, approximately 16 000 children have been reported missing, of which around 25% have never been found or recovered — thus around 75% of children are ultimately found or recovered although the data does not indicate whether they are alive or not at the time of rescue.”

He added it was difficult to obtain case-specific data and conviction rates due to the nature of the crime.

“Abductions are typically divided into “familial” and “stranger” types, with a significant proportion the result of the former. 

“Stranger abductions are further divided into those resulting from sexual exploitation, ransom/extortion and human trafficking. 

“Familial cases are certainly not uncommon though, and occur all too frequently in the country,” Hopewell said.

Childline South Africa, a non-governmental organisation that runs a helpline offering counselling services to children, has handled very few cases regarding those that are missing, according to its chief executive Dumisile Cele.

However, in many cases that the organisation was aware of, people known to the child participated in their trafficking.

“This in the main seems to be for monetary reasons or addressing issues of poverty within the household,” Cele said.

“Sometimes parents or caregivers are not aware that their behaviour amounts to child trafficking, and others are duped into believing their children are taken to get better education opportunities, whereas those involved intend to sell the children or expose them to child labour and other forms of exploitation.”

Substance abuse was another factor that led to the exploitation of children, Cele said.

“But issues of poverty also play a big role as parents may participate in the trafficking of their children for financial gain or believing their children are being moved to another area to gain a better life,” she added.

The SAPS had not responded to questions from the M&G by the time of publication.