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Mozambique: Mozambican Girls Rescued From Sexual Slavery
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
21 March 2008
Posted to the web 21 March 2008
Maputo
Two Mozambican girls have been rescued from sexual slavery in South Africa, and their testimony, shown on Mozambican Television (TVM), is vivid evidence that trafficking in children between Mozambique and South Africa is a real and serious problem.
The two 16 year old girls ended up in Pretoria because they were enticed by a woman they met in January on the Costa do Sol beach in Maputo who promised that they would be able to study and work in South Africa.
"She met me on the beach and said I was pretty", recalled one of the victims. "She asked to be introduced to my friends, and I agreed. She bought Coca-Cola for us".
After initial hesitation, because the Mozambican school year was about to begin, the girls accepted the offer, after they were reassured that they would indeed by able to study in their new home.
But the girls did not have passports. So they crossed the frontier illegally, under the guidance of three young men hired by the woman. The woman herself, whom the girls knew only as "Diana", crossed legally at the Ressano Garcia border post.
In Pretoria, the girls soon found there were no jobs and no school awaiting them. Instead they were taken to a luxury condominium - which turned out to be a brothel, where they were forced to have sex with older men. One of the girls told TVM that she was a virgin, and didn't know what to do to please the client. This earned her a beating from the woman trafficker, who then gave her lessons in how to be a prostitute, including watching pornographic films.
Diana then came clean about the true purpose of their journey. The girls recalled her saying "You haven't come here to work in a beauty salon or to study. You've come to be sex workers for me. We refused and we cried, but she said we had no choice".
Sometimes the Mozambican slaves were obliged to service ten men a day in the Pretoria brothel. They were filmed and photographed, and these images appeared on pornographic websites, where the girls were given false names.
This went on for two months, until a Mozambican lawyer working in South Africa, Inacio Mussanhane, heard about the brothel. In a nearby café, two Angolans told him they knew of a place where teenage girls were available for sex.
Mussanhane investigated. He went to the condominium and pretended to be a client. He managed to ensure that he was alone with the two girls, and then spoke with them in Portuguese, assuring them that he was not interested in sex with them, but wanted to rescue them from the brothel.
He then obtained Diana's cell phone number from one of the Angolans. "I tried to convince her to abandon this activity", he told TVM. But she refused, saying she had been a brothel manager for the past 11 years and had no intention of changing her profession. Realising that she was now in danger, Diana offered Mussanhane a bribe of two million rands to keep his mouth shut.
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He turned her down and went to the police. The two Mozambican girls were released and are now back in Maputo with their families. Diana is under arrest in a South African jail. Her true name and even nationality are not known - for when arrested she was found to be carrying four passports, two of them Mozambican, and two South African.
Clearly Diana was not running this business on her own. Mussanhane said she had admitted to working with many other people both in Mozambique and in South Africa. The extent of the racket is unclear, but it is all too likely that Diana's network has trafficked many other young Mozambican girls into sexual slavery in South Africa.
Pf/ (647)
It is very said to now that this kind of crimes are happening in my country( Mozambique), but in this case the good news is that there are still people whith courage to do something about it.
Silvia
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| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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