Is this your Zimbabwe?

Zimbabwe is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking. Women and girls from Zimbabwean towns bordering South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia are subjected to prostitution in brothels that cater to long-distance truck drivers on both sides of the borders.

The number of prostitution rings in Zimbabwe continued to rise, with many young women and girls sold into prostitution by their parents. Zimbabwean men, women, and children are subjected to forced labour in agriculture and domestic service in the country’s rural areas, as well as domestic servitude and sex trafficking in cities and towns.

Family members recruit children and other relatives to travel from rural areas to cities, where they are subjected to domestic servitude or other forms of forced labour after arrival; some children, particularly orphans, are lured with promises of education or adoption.

Children are forced to labour in the agricultural and mining sectors, or to carry out illegal activities, including drug smuggling.

Additionally, the practice of ngozi, or giving of a family member to another family to avenge the spirits of a murdered relative, creates a vulnerability to trafficking. The individuals given to the wronged family, often girls, are sometimes forced to labour or to marry a member of the new family.

The story above is the opening paragraph of the country chapter on Zimbabwe in the 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report, released this week.

It says Zimbabwean men, women, and children migrate illegally to South Africa, where some are forced to labour for months on farms, construction sites, or in mines without pay before their employers report them to authorities for deportation.

Reports indicate employers use the pretence of regularising the workers’ immigration status to withhold passports. Many Zimbabwean women and some children willingly migrate to South Africa, often with the assistance of taxi drivers who transport them to the border at Beitbridge or nearby. Some of the migrants are then transferred to criminal gangs that subject them to violent attacks, rape, deception, and, in some cases, forced prostitution in Musina, Pretoria, Johannesburg, or Durban.

Zimbabwean women and men are lured into exploitative labour situations in Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Nigeria, and South Africa with false offers of employment in agriculture, construction, information technology, and hospitality; some subsequently become victims of forced labour or forced prostitution.

Women and girls are also lured to China, Egypt, the United Kingdom, and Canada under false pretences, where they are subjected to forced prostitution.

Men, women, and children from Bangladesh, Somalia, India, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia are transported through Zimbabwe en route to South Africa; some of these migrants are trafficking victims.

Women and children from border communities in neighbouring countries are trafficked to Zimbabwe for forced labour, including domestic servitude, and prostitution.

Zambian boys are subjected to prostitution in Zimbabwe. South Asians are victims of forced labour in Zimbabwe and South Africa, following fraudulent recruitment as part of mining investment schemes, through which they become indebted to a trafficking ring.

Chinese nationals reportedly are forced to labour in restaurants in Zimbabwe. Chinese construction and mining companies reportedly employ practices indicative of forced labour, including verbal, physical, and sexual abuse and various means of coercion to induce work in unsafe or otherwise undesirable conditions.

Click here to read the rest of the report on Zimbabwe.

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