“Can I fetch the rubbish bin?” nine-year-old Matthew Ohlsson asked his mom, knowing he needed her permission to go anywhere, even out to the cul-de-sac street where they lived in Mitchells Plain. His sister, Melanie, went with him, and came back into their house before he did. His mother, Michelle, heard Matthew pull the wheelie bin into the yard and the bang when he put it down. Melanie saw her barefoot little brother through the window and walked out to fetch him.
In that “blink of an eye” he went missing, says Michelle. March 23 marks 27 years since Matthew disappeared, she says, sitting in a living room brightened by family photos. On a Christmas tree in the corner Matthew’s name glitters on a crimson bulb, next to his sister’s and brothers’.
Urgent and vigorous searches for Matthew from the moment he vanished — by his family and friends, community members and the police — yielded nothing. False sightings, fake ransom demands and other dead-ends uncovered no answers for the family. But his mother kept on looking, from one decade to the next.
On Tuesday it will be a month since six-year-old Joshlin Smith went missing from Diazville in Saldanha Bay. She, too, has not been found. But In Joshlin’s case her mother, Kelly Smith, Kelly's boyfriend Jacquen ‘Boeta’ Appollis, and Steveno van Rhyn are facing charges of kidnapping and human trafficking.
Katie Modrau, country manager for the South African anti-trafficking organisation A21, which runs the national human trafficking hotline, says: “Not all missing children are trafficked, but many trafficked children are among those reported missing.”
From September last year to February, 348 children went missing in South Africa. National police spokesperson Brig Athlenda Mathe says 207 of them were found or returned voluntarily, and the numbers are constantly updated. Joshlin is among some 141 children still missing this week.
Child trafficking cases reported to the National Hotline for Human Trafficking roughly doubled from 2022 to 2023, says Modrau. “In 2022, about 12% of the cases were child trafficking cases involving minors. In the last year, 22,9% of the cases involved minors. We’re seeing more of it and more people are recognising that children are being exploited and trafficked, but human trafficking is still under-identified and underreported.”
Marcel van der Watt, a former Hawks investigator and human trafficking case consultant, and now research director for the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation in the US, flagged a “great undercount” in trafficking in South Africa in a 2022 report. “Both victims and perpetrators are significantly undercounted. Sex trafficking continues to make up the overwhelming majority [of cases],” he wrote.
In a flip file, Michelle Ohlsson shows me posters of missing girls and boys and warning posters about trafficking with images of brutalised children. Years after Matthew went missing, his mother started an organisation called Concerned Parents of Missing Children to help families find their loved ones, which was active for about 12 years.
“I was happy when a child was reunited with the mother and family, and felt sad for myself,” she says. “We would search day and night. We went looking in town and would even go into brothels with children. The owner would say, ‘If that child is not here, you have nothing to do with the rest,’” she recalls.
I was happy when a child was reunited with the mother and family, and felt sad for myself. We would search day and night. We went looking in town and would even go into brothels with children. The owner would say, ‘If that child is not here, you have nothing to do with the rest
Missing Children South Africa co-ordinator Bianca van Aswegen says: “South Africans need to stop living in a bubble and address human trafficking, which is an increasing problem and not only affecting children. Kidnapping has also escalated.”
There has been an “indisputable uptick” in missing children, says Jacqui Thomas, director of the Pink Ladies organisation, which was founded to help trace missing people. She says social media plays a role in increased reporting and reunions by raising awareness of the problem “and bringing children home”, but it is also an escalating threat to the exploitation of children.
Unbearable economic and environmental pressures fuel human trafficking, says counter-trafficking researcher and UCT graduate Ajwang' Warria of Calgary University in Canada. “We need to look at the environment and structural risks which make children and families vulnerable. Joshlin’s family live in a poor coastal town. I have been to places like that as a researcher and as a social worker. They break your heart,” she says.
A senior researcher at UCT’s Children’s Institute, Lucy Jamieson, says social services in provinces such as Gauteng are being cut and families are increasingly desperate. “They are facing indescribable pressures and allowing children to be prostituted or sold,” she says.
While children and young people on the breadline are at greater risk, more privileged children and youths can also be drawn into trafficking. For example, teenagers in high schools in the Table View area in Cape Town were being used to recruit classmates, says Modrau. Some of them were in grade 8 and grade 9.
“They were victims themselves but they would look like they were having fun in the malls and food courts and get girls to join them,” says Modrau.
“When it got late, they would put them in an Uber which would take them to a brothel. There they would be drugged and chosen from a line-up, afterwards told to shower and then go home in an Uber. There was a lot of pressure on them to keep their mouths shut when the recruiter was at the same school and knew where they lived.”
Roughly a third of the callers to the trafficking hotline last year were recruited through family and friends. Of 40 girls and women now in the A21 aftercare services programme, 39 were victims of sexual exploitation. The hotline gets about 100 to 120 calls a month and last year 79% were directly related to human trafficking, not prank calls or wrong numbers, says Modrau. Trafficking victims themselves made about 4,6% of the calls.
But concerned parents also contact the hotline, helping to expose potential trafficking networks, she says. “One young woman had been offered a teaching post in Vietnam and it looked 100% legitimate, but when we investigated the website was not real, the people were not real. She was a couple of days away from getting on a plane.”
“Online risks are off the charts,” says Marina Reyneke, director of the National Freedom Network, which co-ordinates organisations working against trafficking in South Africa. But, she adds: “More people are also learning about human trafficking and are becoming aware of the red flags, so they contact us.”
Human trafficking locally is dominated by sex trafficking, but children and adults are also trafficked for domestic servitude, labour for farms, mines and factories, and a small fraction for body parts and organs.
The threat to children is most often close to home, experts stressed in interviews. Childline national CEO Dumisile Nala says: “Previously we would talk about ‘stranger danger’ and warn children to be afraid of strangers. Now it is common for children to be experiencing abuse from someone they know.”
• 44: Successfully prosecuted cases of human trafficking from 2007 to 2022, supported in later years by theSA’s Prevention and Combating of Trafficking in Persons (PACOTIP Act) of 2015.
• 16,151: Missing children among the 94,252 missing people reported to the SAPS from 2000 to 2020. A third of them (31,545) were still missing or unaccounted for by 2020.
— In Numbers
She says that about 80% of children taken in at Thuthuzela Care Centres have been abused by “a family member or somebody known to the child”. Van Aswegen confirms that Missing Children South Africa has “seen cases where family members or friends in the community, trusted by children, have been involved [in their disappearance]. This can happen from the poorest to the richest family.”
Research backs this up. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) trafficking report in 2017 found that 41% of children were trafficked by family members. “When I was growing up it was stranger danger. Now it is quite different and there is no ‘one size fits all’ if you look [at patterns] in South Africa,” says Warria, noting that traffickers range from organised crime syndicates to individuals.
Medical Research Council gender and health unit director Naeemah Abrahams, who has analysed child homicides in mortuary-based studies in 2009 and 2017, says: “Children aged five to nine years old are most at risk from people they know and trust. This age group does not have the biggest number of homicides but the perpetrators are usually people they know. Children are very seldom killed by strangers.
“This middle group of Joshlin’s age are at risk of sexual violence and being killed,” she says. “Each missing child should be given attention.”
How then do we protect children from sexual violence and trafficking?
Victims of child trafficking reported by the SAPS from 2000 to 2020.
— 781
Chandré Gould, a senior research fellow in the justice and violence prevention programme at the Institute for Security Studies, says that “positive parenting programmes” are effective in reducing violence against children and parents. “The greatest amount of evidence is for positive parenting programmes which support parents, and they have also had an impact on reducing intimate partner violence,” she says.
Teaching young children about safety is also essential, says Modrau. “We start with three to six year olds, teaching them about safe and unsafe touch, safe and unsafe people and behaviour, and safe and unsafe secrets.”
Van Aswegen urges parents to be hands on: “Safety starts at home with parents and guardians.”
Parents and guardians must report missing children without delay, says Mathe. “When a vulnerable child is missing, the incident must be reported to the SAPS immediately, with emphasis on immediately!”
The public outcry around the disappearance of Joshlin Smith has — like the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal in 2007 — made world headlines but has not uncovered answers.
Michelle Ohlsson says she has one wish left in life: “I pray to God to keep me alive to find out what really happened to Matthew.”
• Suspect trafficking might be taking place? Call 0800 222 777
