An analysis of the South African State’s capacity to respond to human trafficking within Its borders.

Abstract

The dissertation looks at the South African State’s capacity to respond to human trafficking (also referred to Trafficking in Persons) within its borders. Human trafficking is a criminal activity which uses a human being as a commodity. The definition of the crime found in Article 3 of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children 2000 outlines the criminal activities which constitute human trafficking. They include domestic servitude, sexual exploitation, forced marriage etc. The need to pursue the study comes from the concerns of the country being among those where the phenomenon is prevalent. The research has 5 objectives that it intends to achieve: This is i) to establish the legal and policy tools which South Africa uses to deal with human trafficking; ii) look at how it handles different types of human trafficking; iii) the country's ability to respond to different kinds of human trafficking; iv) the social factors that contribute towards the prevalence of human trafficking: and v) how reported cases are handled. The study is a desktop research project which entails collecting secondary data to generate new findings. The study adopted the interpretivist paradigm. The paradigm holds a view that reality is socially constructed and therefore seeks to "understand the subject of world of human experience" (Guba & Lincoln 1989 cited by Kivunja & Kuyini 2017: 8). Data takes different form of dynamics as it reflects human behaviour (Schwartz-Sea & Yanow 2012).