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When Did Our Children Become Commodities?

  • michelleswanepoel1
  • Mar 18
  • 3 min read

Updated: May 30

In South Africa, the laughter of children once echoed through the streets - a symbol of innocence, of hope, of promise. But now, that sound is fading. A dark cloud hangs over our nation, casting a heavy shadow over the faces of our children. Because somewhere along the way, they stopped being seen as human beings. They became commodities - traded, exploited, sold - as if their lives were nothing more than a transaction.


When did we let this happen?


Every 5 hours, a child goes missing in South Africa. Every 5 hours, a parent’s heart is ripped apart. The frantic search, the sleepless nights, the gut-wrenching fear of never knowing what happened. And in 23% of those cases, that fear becomes a lifelong sentence - because those children are never found. Stolen. Gone.


Joshlin Smith’s face has become a haunting reminder of this brutal reality. Six years old. Innocent. Full of life. Until one day in early 2024, she vanished from Saldanha Bay without a trace. The community’s desperate pleas for answers fell into the abyss of silence - a silence that echoes through thousands of homes across our country. Her case is no longer just a story; it’s a wound that South Africa cannot heal from. The trial that has followed, filled with whispers of kidnapping and human trafficking, laid bare the truth we refuse to face: our children are not safe.


But Joshlin is not the only one. Far from it.


In Johannesburg, seven Chinese nationals were convicted for exploiting 91 undocumented Malawians - children as young as 14, forced to work in unimaginable conditions between 2017 and 2019. Boys and girls robbed of their childhood, their dignity, their freedom - treated not as human beings but as tools, dispensable and replaceable.

How did we get here?


How did we allow our children - our children - to become products on the market of human greed? How did it become easier to look away than to fight back? The traffickers know this. They thrive in our silence, in our hesitation, in our failure to act. They lure children with promises of safety, of work, of escape from poverty - and then strip them of everything that makes them human.


And yet, we hesitate to speak about it. We say it’s a problem for the authorities, for the police, for someone else. But it’s not. It’s ours. This is our crisis. Our children’s lives are slipping through our fingers, and we’re standing still.


Human trafficking is not just a crime - it’s a war on childhood. It’s a systematic erasure of innocence. It’s the shattering of lives before they’ve even had the chance to begin. When a child is stolen, a future is stolen. A mother’s arms are left empty, a father’s heart is left broken, and a community is left haunted by the unrelenting question: What if it was my child?

Our children are not for sale. They are not bargaining chips. They are not bodies to be bought and sold. They are the heartbeat of this nation, the future of this land. And if we continue to allow this epidemic of human trafficking to thrive in the shadows, we are complicit in their suffering.


It’s time to break the silence. To demand action. To protect the vulnerable. To stand up for the lost.


Because our children are not commodities. They are human beings. And they deserve to grow up in a world where their lives are sacred, not sold.


 
 
 

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