A month ago the international community sat up and took notice when 276 girls were captured by the militant rebel group, Boko Haram, in Nigeria.
Soon celebrities and ordinary people teamed up and formed the Bring Back Our Girls campaign.
South Africans also joined this campaign and protested outside the Nigerian embassy against the kidnapping of these girls.
It is understandable that we should be upset about these kidnappings and that we should protest to save the lives of these 276 girls.
Somebody should do something, shouldn’t they?
The tragedy is that, while South Africans are protesting the disappearance of girls in Nigeria, the same thing happens daily on our own soil.
According to the LexisNexis Human Trafficking Awareness Index released in November last year, an overwhelming estimated 100 000 people are trafficked in this country annually.
This means that 8 000 people are sold for various purposes in South Africa every month, a truly staggering figure.
Unfortunately it is unknown how many of these 8 000 people are children, but a child goes missing every six hours in South Africa, according to figures released by the South African Police Service Missing Persons Bureau.
This adds up to a total of 1460 children per year; that is 121 missing South African children every month.
The South African Centre for Missing and Exploited Children says these children are sexually exploited, sold into slavery, sold for organ donation purposes and killed for their body parts to make muti.
According to Unicef, there are 30 000 child sex slaves in South Africa today. Statistics show that 45% of rapes reported to the SAPS in 2013, were child rapes; the rape of children under the age of 12-years-old.
While we are waving protest signs and screaming against the injustice of 276 innocent children kidnapped (and still alive) in Nigeria, who screams against the injustice done to our own children on our own soil every day?
