NEWS
Child sex ordeal over but trauma remains, Cape Argus, 29 July 2007

Tears trickle down her cheeks and leave wet spots on the bright pink scarf hanging loosely around her neck.
Nomsa (not her real name) turns her face away and wipes it with a crumpled piece of toilet paper:
"I don't sleep at night. It was such a shock for me when they told me she had been selling her body. Maybe it will be better if I don't ever see that woman."
The traumatised woman had a few weeks earlier found out that her 14-year-old daughter was one of four girls allegedly enticed by a Khayelitsha woman, Nosiphiwo Nyandeni, 37, and her boyfriend Vuyisana Tashako, 24, to work as sex workers for food.

'I don't sleep at night' The young girls had sex with men from a nearby shebeen and other regular clients, all in the same age range as their brothers, fathers and grandfathers, in return for less than R100. The girls handed the money over to the woman who plied them with food.
It was April 27, Freedom Day, when Thenji (not her real name), a staff member at the Simelela Rape Centre, answered her ringing cellphone.
"It was a Friday," she recalls clearly. "The counsellors told me it was chaotic at the centre and that they couldn't cope. They told me there were lots of angry parents and children."
When she arrived, she found a group of angry and distressed parents and caregivers who had just found out their children had been used as sex workers.
According to Thenji, Nyandeni, who has since been charged, used the girls during the mornings on the Mfuleni-Faure Road where men in cars paid between R50 and R80.
'I will never forget that day' The men would take the girls to an unused school building nearby and rape them.

In the afternoons the group would return to the Khayelitsha shack where they were sold to men from a nearby shebeen.
Nyandeni stayed in the shack with her boyfriend and her three children who, according to Thenji, often witnessed the sex acts, but were not used as sex workers.
One of the Simelela counsellors saw the shack after police had swooped on the premises: "The shack was in a filthy state with used condoms lying everywhere. In one bucket there was clothes and old food.
"Even while we were there to see the place, men were coming in asking us where the girls were that they could have sex with," said the counsellor, still visibly traumatised.
"I will never forget that day. These children are too small for that. They were so very dirty and hungry when we found them," she sighs, shaking her head.
According to Nomsa, the woman also forced the girls to break into their homes when their parents were not there.
"I used to go looking for her all the time. She would disappear for a few days and I would look everywhere."
According to a Simelela report, evidence of dagga and alcohol use was also found in the shack.
The racket was exposed when one of the girls refused to have sex with a man. Instead she ran to a police station and led officers to the shack. Nomsa said her daughter was rebellious and still disappeared for several days at a time. She said the child had been admitted to a place of safety, but that all the girls had been sent home.
"I don't know where to go for help any more. I have tried the social workers, the principal, her teachers, but everyone says they cannot help me. I would like her to be helped, but nobody wants to help."
Lisa Vetten of the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre said the child's behaviour was typical of someone who had been exposed to such trauma and that it was outrageous that no assistance could be given to the mother and child.
"This again exposes the inability of the system to deal with adolescents and their unique problems," she said. "No places of safety want to take adolescents as they are more of a challenge."
Vetten said she was currently aware of only one shelter in the country prepared to assist adolescents. Simelela staff members said they were "still trying to make sense of it all". "We hope that by talking to one another about it that it will become easier," Thenji says. - Health-e News Service
This article was originally published on page 6 of The Cape Argus on July 29, 2007

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