• I met 17 year old Sindiswa late one night in July 2009, in a hospital in Bloemfontein, South Africa. A few days earlier she had been found lying unconscious in the street by Nomzi, an outreach worker from a local church that works to help girls like Sindiswa. Nomzi had befriended her a few months earlier. Sindiswa was from a village in the Eastern Cape and had ended up in Bloemfontein after a ‘friend’ had come back to the village and told her she could get work in the city if she went back with her. With no surviving parents and never having finished school, she took the opportunity to try make a life for herself. Sindiswa’s childhood friend “Elizabeth” joined her. The two girls were told by the ‘friend’ that they could stay with her boyfriend. Once they arrived, the 'friend' disappeared, leaving both girls behind. They were soon put to work on the streets forced to sell their bodies for sex in exchange for money, by 'Jude', to pay for their rent and food. From that point on, through threats of violence and the abuse of the girls’ vulnerability, he controlled their lives, taking all their work earnings and watching their every move. Sindiswa told us about Elizabeth, but that she hadn’t seen her for a long time and didn’t know where she was. Sindiswa also said to tell people about her, she wanted her story told. Sindiswa passed away a week later, along with her unborn baby. She was 3 months pregnant.
  • Sindiswa lying in her hospital bed, perspiration beading on her forehead and soaking the pillow.
  • Too weak to move, Sindiswa lay curled up in a tiny bundle and stared intently at the camera.
  • Nomzi, who found Sindiswa in the streets a few days earlier, leans over to softly talk to Sindiswa
  • Nomzi comforts Sindiswa in her distress, both shed tears.
  • Sindiswa rests pensively after telling some of her story.
  • Sindiswa sitting in the ward the following day, waiting to to see her friend Elizabeth who was found the night before.
  • Sindiswa, at the Sunflower Hospice in Bloemfontein before reunion with her friend Elizabeth.
  • Sindiswa said she wanted to be known, and her story told. She passed away a week later, alone in the hospital. She had been 3 months pregnant.
  • I saw a young girl in a red jacket, standing on a dark and lonely street corner. The young girl turned out to be 15 year old Elizabeth (a pseudonym), the childhood friend of Sindiswa who I had just met in hospital. She desperately wanted to go home, but couldn’t leave because ‘Jude’ had her clothes, and explained that if she left them behind, “He will witch me”. It was the first time I came across the threat of witchcraft as a form of manipulation to entrap victims. The church outreach workers managed to retrieve her stuff and get her out of the house that night. The next day we drove her to another city close to her home village, into the care of police and social workers. At age 11, Elizabeth had to leave school to care for her mother who was ill. Upon recovery her mother went to get a job in Cape Town and left Elizabeth in the care of her much older sister, who treated her badly. Her friend Sindiswa’s offer to join her and go to Bloemfontein sounded like the ideal opportunity. The day after her rescue, a social worker said she was never trafficked because she went willingly - a clear indication that the issue was remained largely misunderstood. A victim is often not initially forced into being trafficked, coercion & fraud are the most common methods used; also under South African law, as a minor, her ‘willing’ consent was irrelevant. Like her friend Sindiswa, Elizabeth was also pregnant. Her beautiful baby girl was born in the December after her rescue. Elizabeth wanted to return home to her mother in Eastern Cape after she had her baby. The woman who recruited the girls was found and gave evidence which led to the apprehension of “Jude”.
  • Elizabeth standing on the corner as I first saw her. She was wearing a thin lightweight jacket and strappy sandals. It was mid winter and around 2 degrees celsius.
  • Elizabeth was hesitant when I asked if I could photograph her face, I would've wanted her beauty to be seen, however the sensitivity required of the situation means the only other photograph of Elizabeth in this series is of her as a baby.
  • Elizabeth stood on the corner, beneath this notorious block of apartments in Bloemfontein previously raided by police.
  • A young girl walking dark streets, as our car drives past.
  • Cold, dusty and windswept dirt roads of the town in the Eastern Cape where Elizabeth came from.
  • One of the poorest parts of South Africa, the Eastern Cape offers very little opportunity for a better life for those who grow up there.
  • The house that Elizabeth's mother calls home.
  • Inside the house that Elizabeth left when she went with her friend to Bloemfontein. Meagre possessions and a cold home speak of life's struggles.
  • Elizabeth's mother sitting in the main room of her house, in front of the open brazier on which she cooks. She shares her story and anxiously tells of Elizabeth's disappearance.
  • Elizabeth’s mother thought she was dead, her grief and relief were evident when she found out otherwise.
  • A photo of Elizabeth as a baby in her grandmother’s house. Still a child when she was trafficked, Elizabeth had never dreamed of one day being prostituted. No girl ever does.
  • “Mandisa” (a pseudonym) was either 12 or 13 when she was first trafficked from an impoverished township outside of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. She had been exposed to life on the street after being orphaned. She was taken into the care of relatives but with no real support, as is the case with many children in South Africa, she fell through the cracks. She was eventually sold to another pimp and taken to Bloemfontein, but she struggled to remember clearly the details and the timeline of her experiences over the years; a result of her trauma. She tried to piece her story together when I met her in a safe house near Port Elizabeth in 2009, when she was 17. She recalls the girls that she lived with and was forced to work alongside, while in Bloemfontein. She also recalls the violence and trauma she suffered during those years. She was frequently beaten, even stabbed and shot at, raped and brutalized. She once helped one of the other girls give birth because no doctor came, and witnessed the abortion of another girl's baby. Upon arrival at the safe house, because of her prolonged trauma, Mandisa suffered severe psychological stress and breakdowns. Her road to recovery was never going to be an easy one. The successive investigation led police to uncover a larger syndicate and make a few arrests throughout the country. It was believed that a tip-off led to the main syndicate members avoiding arrest.
  • Mandisa telling her story.
  • The township where Mandisa grew up, just outside Port Elizabeth, in South Africa's Eastern Cape.
  • A house in Port Elizabeth that features in Mandisa's story, one of the locations she was kept. She left here after being sold to another man and taken to Bloemfontein.
  • The room at the safe house that she shared with other young girls who had been victims of violence.
  • Mandisa fidgets with a favoured stuffed animal while she talks.
  • One of her favourite activities at the safe house was playing a game of pool with the other girls.
  • Under the constant, caring and watchful eye of one of the social workers, a 'mother' to all the young girls in the safe house.
  • A trip out of the safe house for a special lunch.
  • Pure joy at being served chocolate brownies and ice-cream.
  • Shameena (a pseudonym) was found wondering the streets of Ladybrand, a small town near Bloemfontein in South Africa. She had escaped from the house where she had been forced to work for little food and no pay. Shameena had come from India, she spoke only Urdu. She had signed up with an agency in Mumbai that recruits Indian women to work abroad as domestic workers. She was told that the money she would earn would first pay for her plane ticket and then be hers to send home to her family. Upon arrival in South Africa, through Lesotho, her passport and other possessions were taken from her and kept by her ‘employers’. She could speak no English (a means of entrapping victims as they cannot communicate), but she luckily ended up at a police station and after managed to find a translator, she was put in a safe house. Though the language barrier made things difficult for her, she was cared for and managed to develop close bonds with those who lived and worked at the house. Her ‘employers’ were eventually charged with offenses under the Immigration and Basic Conditions of Employment Acts; they were fined, and forced to pay for Shameena’s return to India. Under the legal framework in 2010 prior to South Africa's anti-human trafficking legislation being passed, Shameena was classified as an undocumented (illegal) immigrant and had the investigating officer not found her passport in her employers’ possession, she would merely have been deported as such. Police used information given by her employers to further their investigation into the syndicate that recruited her from India and brought her into South Africa, through Lesotho. Shameena is now home with her family in India, with help from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
  • Shameena takes the hand of the house manager as she tells Shameena’s story, her gesture says so much with no words.
  • The details of the people who recruited her, which she kept in her notebook. As she spoke and wrote only in Urdu, learning her story was a challenge for those who assisted her. After a translator was found, the police eventually went to the house where she had been working, there they found her hidden passport and investigations began.
  • Shameena would often look at the only photos of her family that she had with her. She was eventually reunited with them in India.
  • Shameena called the safe house home for the months it took to complete the investigation, all the while longing to go home to her family.
  • Shameena at home in the safe house, preparing tea for herself in the kitchen with one of the safe house mothers and the safe house Jack Russell.
  • Shameena made friends with another woman who had been rescued and brought to the safe house. Without the ability to communicate, their friendship was based on understanding and empathy.
  • Here the two friends spend time together watching television.
  • This is a collection of intersecting stories, which together tell of what can be found in suburbs across the country. During the 2010 Football World Cup, I received a phone call asking for help from a contact and friend, Babalwa, who works with sex workers and victims of trafficking on Johannesburg’s streets. Babalwa had found Musa (a pseudonym). I had previously met Musa on the streets with Babalwa. Musa had previously managed to escape, but sadly as is common with many victims after escape, they return. Confusion, uncertainty, mistrust and fear (a result of their trauma), as well as their dependence on their pimps, result in them going back to what was familiar. Additionally, if addicted to drugs and without timely intervention, their need for their daily fix frequently lures them back. Musa once again wanted to leave but was just as fearful as before. She was being forced to sleep with men everyday by the man who controlled her and other girls in the house, she had to ‘pay her way’. Musa knew some others who wanted to escape, so she decided to try again, and called Babalwa. A police raid was conducted early in the morning at the house, a functioning brothel, in Rosettenville Johannesburg. Within the house as well as outside in the yard, there were numerous rooms with numerous girls present. No arrests were made as the pimps were not there (they live off-site and leave a guard to watch over their enterprise). So without anything tangible on which to pin arrests, like drugs or weapons, police merely left the premises. The girls all claimed to be over 18, as they are instructed to do. Many are afraid of the police and don’t view them as ‘help’, rather as additional ‘abusers’. Mawande, one young girl found in the house that day, left with Babalwa.
  • The front room of the house with a plastic covered mattress and a mirror against the wall. A young woman hides her face as she walks out.
  • In a room behind a locked gate, was Wandi (pseudonym). Wandi was an antagonistic young women, much younger than her professed 18 years.
  • Wandi with one of the raid officers. Addicted to drugs, under severe threat of violence with burn marks and scars to prove it, and with no trust in the police who’d arrested her for prostitution in the past, she resisted leaving, stating that “her man” would use witchcraft on her if she ever ran away. She was found murdered a number of months after this raid.
  • A cold, dark and damp house, with warmth provided by an electric stove.
  • In another room, was 17-year-old Mawande (a pseudonym). She’d come from Eastern Cape 6 months earlier with her sister who said she would put her in school. Arriving in Jo’burg she found herself deserted and in the ‘care’ of a man she didn’t know. She escaped only to land up in the hands of another. Mawande had been gang raped week before by a group of unknown men (often a part of the ‘breaking-in process’) “He bought me a little pink dress and told me to go on the streets, but I didn’t want to do it”, Mawande said. She left with Babalwa that day.
  • The only man in the house at that time. He said he was visiting his brother, his papers stated he was an asylum seeker. Evasive to questions it emerged that he was watching the house during the day, presumedly as a guard, while the pimps were at their own residences.
  • The man subsequently began packing his bags as a bizarre scenario unfolded with police leaving stating they found nothing (drugs) to pin any arrests on. With no anti-trafficking legislation in place at the time, misunderstanding of the crime was prevalent.
  • The bathroom in the house, where at the very minimum ten girls or women resided, some with babies, as well as at times the men who sometimes stayed at the house.
  • At the front of the house on the patio, was a mattress hidden from the street behind a sheet of cardboard. A steel pipe lay on the mattress.
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