Government should do more to fight child-trafficking

What you need to know:

  • The issue: Child trafficking
  • Our view: Although government is making efforts to fight the vice, more needs to be done to protect children across the country

Last week, the Daily Monitor carried a story, “Boy narrates his escape from captivity in Kenya”. In the article, the 14-year-old spoke of how he was kidnapped when he had been sent back home from school to put on school uniform. He thought he was helping people who seemed lost by giving them directions, only to be snatched, dragged into a car and taken to a forest in Kenya, where they were made to cut trees for charcoal every morning.

They were fed on water and chapatti most of the time and were drugged in order not to have the strength to escape. He, however, managed to escape a year later and live to tell his ordeal. Many of the other children he found there are believed to still be in captivity.

In another incident that Daily Monitor reported under the headline, “Missing school girls found”, three school girls who had gone missing from different schools in Busoga Sub-region were found after allegedly eloping with boda boda cyclists and porters and the mother of one of them reported that the man who eloped with her daughter would lock her inside, go to work and open for her at night.

These are but a few of the harrowing stories of children who are being trafficked across the country and out of it for purposes of forced labour and sexual exploitation. According to the Police Annual Crime Report, 2017, there were 106 victims reported to have been trafficked internally in the past year. All of them were children.

There were 209 victims trafficked transnationally, of which 43 of these were children. The report states that “majority of the registered victims of both internal and transnational trafficking were subjected to labour and sexual exploitation among adult transnational victims and child sacrifice among the internal trafficking victims.

Other forms of exploitation included use of children in armed conflicts, harmful child labour and illicit adoptions. Among the child sexual exploitation cases were some incidents of child marriages.”

The effects of trafficking on a child (and adult) are horrendous with many suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, losing a sense of self-worth and others losing their lives.

The Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act, 2009, provides for laws against the trafficking of any person. According to the Trafficking in Persons Report, an annual report issued by the US State Department’s office to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, Uganda is ranked in Tier 2, which tier constitutes “countries whose governments do not fully comply with Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards”.

It is commendable that the government is making efforts. As shown by the incidents and statistics above, more needs to be done to protect children across the country.

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