Interviewee: Alison Brown
Interviewer: Phinius Sebatsane
List of Acronyms: AB: Alison Brown
PS: Phinius Sebatsane
Welcome to another empowering episode of the Free to Fly podcast! For those joining us for the first time, we extend a warm welcome to our vibrant community. Free to Fly isn’t just a podcast: we’re a counter child-trafficking organization based in South Africa. Today, we’re honored to have Alison Brown as our guest, a former social worker deeply familiar with the struggles of nearby communities. Joining her is our incredible host, Phinius Sebatsane. Together, they shed light on the harsh realities faced by young individuals trapped in exploitation. Through Alison’s lens, we witness the profound importance of counseling in aiding survivors through their journey of trauma and recovery. They’ll also discuss the pressing need for societal change, urging us to tackle the root causes of these issues. It’s a call to action, reminding us that true transformation requires nurturing both the seed and the soil from which it springs. Get ready for raw, honest conversations delving deep into the heart of social development. Welcome aboard!
PS: Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Phinius Sebatsane – I’m back. Welcome to our Free to Fly podcast. If you don’t know about our podcast, Free to Fly is an anti-trafficking organisation that works with children. Basically, what they do is rescue children from vulnerable situations. A huge part of what we are doing is trying to educate the community, and educate ourselves, about the work we are doing. So if its your first time – or if you have been listening to these podcasts, thank you for listening and I will really encourage you to share it with other people, because it will be informative and educational at the same time. I have an amazing guest in the house – she was a little bit nervous, but I’m going to try to ease her a little bit so she can relax. Thank you so much for being part of this podcast and for bringing a bit of education into the level of trauma that people go through in the trafficking side. But, I would like you to introduce yourself a little bit: who you are, some of the work you have been doing – just for people to understand who we’re talking to.
AB: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me and, it always feels good to talk about the work that one has done. My name is Alison Brown, I studied to be a social worker after opening up a restaurant when I was 40, and I graduated at 46, now I’m 60 and I have gone back into the food industry. So, those are my loves and my passions – and my callings. I was very fortunate to work in the field in Ocean View in Cape Town, our local community, and I had about 200 foster care cases. A lot of the reading I’ve done was human trafficking. There are a lot of cases with children in foster care. We found that, when the kids hit 12 – 14, the wheels came off. Every single home – it was quite amazing, even after all the years, to watch that pattern and the vulnerability of where these children felt where they landed – with no parents. I worked in Ocean View for 6 years and then I worked in a safe house for abused women and that was when I really started learning about human trafficking, because we worked with other safe houses that dealt primarily with human trafficking. I went on great courses, and did quite a bit. I was in private practice and that’s where I met Jessie, from Free to Fly, and I just really, really believe that what they’re doing is extraordinary.
PS: You have experience –I think people usually want to retire early, but I tell my mentors, don’t retire with all that knowledge and wisdom. We still need it, to educate ourselves – especially in this area of human trafficking, because a lot of times, people think human trafficking happens in America, or very far off. But its actually next door, its very close to us. You said you were working mostly with foster children when you started. I grew up as an orphan – I grew up in the foster system. And one of the things I realised is that when you are at a certain age, maybe you’re 16, or you’re 19, you kind of have to leave. And the question is, where do you go. If there’s no reintegration, they can’t connect you with family, you’re more likely to end up homeless, on the street. I work with homeless people, some of the people that I got to interact with on the street come from the foster system. So, I question if what is being done there is actually helping. Maybe you can help in terms of how holistic we might be with integrating children back into society, – maybe with their family members. How does human trafficking and that kinda meet each other half way.
AB: I’m going to step back to where you said people think – oh, human trafficking’s in America, or getting on an aeroplane, or bus, or something. That was one of the things that stood out for me really profoundly when I was doing courses and things about human trafficking: that I had been in a society, or community, where human trafficking was on our doorstep, and we never spoke about it. That was 2011 to 2016. We never spoke about human trafficking once. It really opened up my mind when I thought back about my clients and the vulnerability of living in that poverty and, – just every situation was actually human trafficking if you look at it. And then I started speaking about it like that, especially for the women who came into the safe house, mostly from Ocean View, and how human trafficking is in almost every sentence.
PS: You remind me of a saying – somebody once said, I would have freed more slaves if I knew there were slaves. So, I think sometimes people don’t know they are trafficked, or kidnapped and this is normal. But when you educate them, hey – this is human trafficking.
AB: That’s when I get so excited and want to stand with a microphone in the middle of a community and say – all of you are being human trafficked if this and this and this is happening to you. To cut the culture of the way they are living, we also have to go to the bottom: those children have to break the cycle, and that for me is – I get super passionate about that – because that’s the frustration, that workers in a community have the same mentality every day. I get some clients in that – OK this is going to stop – and they got really excited, because I was passionate about it, and then we have some great end results.
PS: You awaken people to something where they realise, hey, this thing is wrong. Once people are awakened, to being aware, the more they want to get involved and actually do something about that. I want to draw it back to children, because, as you were speaking, I got triggered by this young little girl who is missing: it is so close – so close to home that even till today, they are still looking for her. In situations like this, what do you say to the community members in terms of being aware. What are some the things that they can maybe on the look out for something like this.
AB: I think that education is really . . . but, I hate to say it, but when there’s a community that are all in it, on the same level, and not coming together to break those cycles, . . . I don’t know – I sometimes just lose my faith in it. I know all of us in this kind of work have those days. We did a course for community members, there were about 10, and everybody who went through the entire parenting course got new beds, and new bedding – it was an organisation from overseas that sponsored this. But, the enthusiasm, because there was an end result, we caught those ten people and they learnt parenting skills that they didn’t even know existed. You don’t want to bribe people, but there’s got to be something in it for them, because, when you’re so lost, and you’re poor, and you have no economic opportunities, and everyone around you is just drunk and on drugs and stealing and in jail and out of jail, – it’s the whole society. That, that is why I believe you’ve just got to get a whole new generation to really see this: the only way to do that is in the schools.
PS: Exactly – most kids, learners, spend more time at school than they spend at home. We have such a platform to go into that space and educate those children. And, I don’t think that that you said, is bribing, because, I believe that you can’t teach somebody something on an empty stomach. I think you were going into the parenting side, because, parenting is not a thing that people are born with. It’s a skill that you need to learn, and if grew up in a broken home, and then you have a child, you probably don’t know what to do with that child. You spoke about alcohol and all those things, – and then you live in a poor community, and you think, how do I teach these women how to be good parents, when they were never taught how to be good parents.
AB: I think that the language, the way to break that – its 2024 now – you don’t have to still do what your grandparents did – you’ve got to break the past. I’m just speaking from my experience of working in a community, and then, being out of it – working with people from the community, out of it, and seeing how they had different lifestyle in the safe house. However, their brains still work the same way and they didn’t really know how to change. We had to guide them on how they can change and how to speak to their children and not just hit and shout and scream because there is another way.
PS: I’m running a safe house right now, and the women we work with, they’re children: they will tell you, I have children, but I don’t know how to be a mother to my children. And now, we have to teach them how to be parents to their children. You also realise that you’re dealing with a child – in a 30 year old.
AB: Exactly – so, to answer your questions, those people have all been trafficked in some form, so, your question to me, how do you deal with that trauma, – they literally need to be in therapy. Everyone needs to be in therapy, that’s why these great workshops are so amazing, where they can come into a safe place and that’s what’s so beautiful about the safe houses.
PS: The unfortunate thing is that mental health has been so demonised – if you go to see a counsellor, or you see a therapist, you’re ‘sick’ or something is wrong with you. How do we normalise therapy, how do we normalise counselling when it comes to dealing with people with trauma.
AB: In schools – where you allow children to sit in a circle and talk about what’s going on at home, and hear them.
PS: . . . Oh, we care so much about grades – doesn’t matter . . .
AB: And those poor children who come from very destructive homes etc have to sit in a classroom, hungry, and . . . this is, . . . Who wants to reinvent the wheel, but come on, people . . .
PS: One of the conversations that I had with someone is that stuff like psychology and counselling should be introduced in primary school. You know, like emotional intelligence, or something like that: how do you deal with your emotions, because, I think that if we learn that, we would have less people in prison. A lot of people are in prison because they got into those situations because they didn’t know how to respond to their trauma or pain.
AB: And the people who have been human trafficked and don’t even know they are being human trafficked – are the result as well. Thinking back to the community I worked in – every single one of those women, in some form, were trafficked.
PS: I work with gangsters – when I told someone that gangsterism is human trafficking – then somebody was , like, what? : Sex, money, drugs, – it’s the same method. Going back to you in the days working with victims of human trafficking, what were some of the challenging things you had to deal with, dealing with clients who had been trafficked.
AB: I think the biggest challenge for me, and the organisation as a whole, was that, there was nowhere for them to go. They could be safe with us, and have counselling, etc etc, and they went straight back into that situation, and you have to get that entire family to change and that was virtually impossible. So, you get a beautiful young girl who just gives you this feeling that she’s so grateful that there is hope, and then she goes home, and she goes through the same trauma. And then, she comes back next week, and the same thing. And that, as social workers, those are the days you lose faith: you don’t give up, but you lose faith. – Am I really making a difference. Yes, we are making a difference on that day, as a group of professional people, but, what happens when that person doesn’t have a room to go into and talk to somebody.
PS: Because you clean them up, but they have to go back to the mud, and they come back with the mud again – it’s a whole cycle.
AB: So, to not just sound doom and gloom, because somebody has to continue this work. Again, if you can model children in a school system, with how the outside world can look, and how they do have a voice and how its okay to speak up and those kinds of things. Without communication, no one is going to know anything. Most of them shut down – that’s the big problem. They shut down.
PS: Were you dealing mostly with boys, girls, or women.
AB: Everybody. In the foster care, every 2 years you’ve got to go back to court to re-do the foster care application. Then you’ve got to deal with the parents. You have to make sure that the parents are still in a position where they are not okay to look after the kids. Then you’re also dealing with the foster parents – whether they are family, or not – whether they are regular people who have taken in the children. So, there’s this whole dynamic every 2 years, of bringing everyone together. There are triggers, and triggers, and there are triggers – over and over again. And then, there’s hope that those mums will rehabilitate and the fathers will rehabilitate and the children can go back. There were a few good, happy cases, but very little.
PS: There’s a lady that we’re working with on the street right now that unfortunately she was using her case to back. Obviously social development got involved and they took the kids and they put them in a safe environment. But now you end up with kids who are crying Mummy, Mummy, Mummy – always Mummy. What do you say. What do you say when you have kids who are crying out for their mother. They are probably not aware of what is happening with their mothers. How do you deal with that trauma of a child being disconnected from their mother. You know how a mother is bonded to her child from a very young age. How do counsellors and psychologists or social workers deal with that separation.
AB: That child, from that moment, will be scarred for the rest of his or her life because you can’t cut a bond like that. In the safe house, when the children were already so traumatised and the mums needed to go to the doctor, or to the court, and couldn’t take the children with, we used to let the mum ‘practice’ and she would go to the gate, the child would cry, and then 3 minutes later, the mum would come back: so the child knew that the mum was coming back. We did this over and over again until the child trusted us – this was a week before the mum had to go. That was so traumatic – just those moments. Now, to take children away, and the mum not be able to see, it is the cruellest thing, because that mum is only begging or whatever because she is a victim of circumstances. Whether it is a choice to do drugs – she’s choosing drugs because she’s got pain from somewhere else. And if you have real empathy, you’ll never take a child away from its mother – in my opinion. You’ve got to work with that mum with the child. Why separate them?
PS: What happens is, we take the child and hope that the mother will follow, but then the mother ends up not following. Then, like you said, the child gets scarred, the mother also gets scarred forever because she lives with the guilt and the shame.
AB: That child will live with rejection and self-esteem issues for ever and ever and ever. Because, if a parent doesn’t want you, or doesn’t follow you, then, whatever her choice of drug or whatever, is stronger than . . . I don’t even know if its love – I think sometimes, that some of the very bad cases that we had, you almost feel that the mum doesn’t have the love – like – if you talk about an ordinary upstanding kind of family, where the love is real, because it’s so ‘perfect’.
PS: You’re reminding me of a book called ‘When helping hurts’. Sometimes we think we are helping, but we are actually hurting. Unfortunately, that’s the system that we have. Are there any good stories – because I know this can be a little bit of a nightmare. When you look back, are there some stories where – that case would be a great example of what can happen if we do the right thing.
AB: The good cases, and there were many good cases amongst the very many not good cases. The good cases, if I really have to think about what is good, was when the child managed to go through school, got a job, and had become educated and the parents either went to a rehab and got better, or just bettered their own life, they had little input. I am still all over in the community, and I hear ‘Aunty Ali, Aunty Ali’ all over the place and these are often children who are now working in the pharmacies, in the stores, in Pick’nPay and that were ‘the naughty kids’ and I loved working with all the naughty children – I actually went to one of the local schools, just to work with the naughty kids, or the boys. They were naughty – bad kids – but I loved that. And those are a lot of those kids. They are working now, and those are the good stories. So, whatever little stuff that you can plant . . . There are lots of stories, but to answer your question, if you see them out there, and they are maintaining a life, for me that is a great story.
PS: I like the naughty kids story, a lot of times people go and work and, – I am a missionary – so you will go into other places in the world and everybody is always looking for the cute kid. But there’s always that naughty one that nobody wants to play with. But what people don’t realise, – there’s a leader in there, there’s gold that needs to be discovered.
AB: I actually pushed the principal – I said I want all the naughty children. I landed up with about 22. I don’t think the principal actually wanted me to come because I had these 22 naughty boys with me. But we did great things, and we did great activities and stuff and they all participated. It became very therapeutic. That’s what I mean – every group becomes therapeutic. You know that – you’ve done this forever. And that is exciting for me because everyone gets that chance.
PS: There’s a mother right now that we have helped and right now she’s at a very stable place work-wise – we still need to help her leave the environment that she’s living in with some of her kids. Her eldest daughter was separated from her while she was still using, and her daughter is now in university studying – she’s going to become a lawyer. You see the daughter with her adopted family doing so well, and now you’re looking at the mother, and the mother is also doing well. But, there’s mother wounds and there’s daughter wounds. How do you reconcile that. How do you bring these two people together. They were separated, for their own benefit, because . . . Ja, I sometimes believe that the only way to help a seed from not dying in its own environment, is to remove it and put it in a healthy environment.
AB: Sure. And there are new experiences – and time. And, obviously, that whole way of healing, of forgiveness. You have to go through all those 19 propositions and get to be whole again yourself; and then accept, then you can forgive, and then you can accept again. I think that, for that particular case, if that mother steps up with pride, and creates new experiences, even if they are just a walk on the beach, because she’s not the lawyer, she can’t take her to Constantia Village for a coffee – but, she can walk on the beach. If she does just something minor, and then the daughter brings what she can bring to uplift her mum, like, buy her new duvets or whatever the case is, they will form that bond all over again – there is that chance. I believe there always is another chance. If you’re going to walk through your life – I don’t think that this young girl, I don’t know her obviously, but I think she’s got such an incredible will to have gone to study that she is smart enough to know she can rekindle with her mum. It’s a choice.
PS: That is something we are trying to facilitate at the moment, is how do we bring these two people together and reconcile them. There has to be a middleman. She can grow up and become a lawyer and can become successful, but, like you said, the connection is . . .
AB: You get up every day, and you know that your mum and you aren’t together. It doesn’t go away – it’ll pop into her head, in the middle of an exam. It will just always be there.
PS: A lot of people focus a lot on addiction, addiction, addiction. People don’t realise that people end up running to drugs because they are wounded. How do you educate people to understand; I see so many people who are addicted, are in prison and they are not rehabilitated. Their trauma is not being dealt with. Everybody’s applauding – oh, I’ve been sober for this long; but, have you healed from your trauma. Unless you have been healed from that, I feel you are still going to run from those things. With women and children who are being abused, how do you prevent them from running to drugs and alcohol as a medication to deal with their trauma.
AB: That’s a really, really tough question. The reason I say it’s a tough question is because, – often I just wanted to be like a little angel, protecting all those people because they are vulnerable and their environment is so raw, and in my opinion, not sociably acceptable. Which maybe comes across as snobbish, but if you can take people out of that, and give them just some light . . . That’s why the folk that came to the safe house, – it was actually quite amazing for them: they were around joyful and heartwarming and love and support and . . . So, like we said when we started, everyone needs therapy; if everyone can’t get therapy, then let’s break it down.
PS: That’s what I don’t understand – why therapy is so expensive – who are the people who need therapy, its mostly poor people. If I can not afford therapy, I don’t have the money for that, – and we have more prisons that we have rehabs in poor communities.
AB: That’s why we need more social workers, because with the department, – our clients didn’t pay. I was contracted to them, so, if you don’t come, you don’t fill the appointment someone else is missing because I can only counsel on those days. There should be a platform where people can go. There are some offices, but there’s not enough. And, the social work system doesn’t allow for good counselling. There should just be counsellors, and not just addiction, or foster care, or . . . there should be counsellors, day and night for people. And that’s what was so beautiful about the police stations having those trauma counselling rooms – that fell away and that was such a pity. Because then there was a place – any time, day and night. But, because there’s no money to pay anybody, you can’t expect people just to volunteer and volunteer and volunteer. Every single person who does a job should get some remuneration of some sort, even if it’s a stipend because then that’s how people can survive.
PS: Also, as a social worker, that field of work can be traumatising. That’s why social workers have supervisors – they have somebody to go to to debrief with. For me, I don’t understand why policing and law enforcement is more promoted than social work. Mental health -the issue that we are talking about right now, is not a police problem, I think it’s a social problem which needs a social intervention. Unfortunately, I feel that often we end up using surgery equipment to fix a car. What do you think needs to be done to promote issues of human trafficking in schools. I know we need the police – I know safety and security is a big thing in South Africa. We need this. But I think, from a social point, there can be so much prevention.
AB: It’s got to be more prominent. Like I said, when I was working in Ocean View, we didn’t even talk about human trafficking, and, I was a social worker. Only 8 years later – it’s like, oh my goodness, that all was human trafficking. So people didn’t know – they don’t know. They don’t know the word, because they thought about the word being taking on an aeroplane, to or from far away. We’ve got to get to the little leagues, we’ve got to get to the little girls, the little boys and teach them. Maybe a different way than how they’ve been taught because the cycles haven’t been broken yet.
PS: You realise, even at school, – when I was in primary school, no one spoke about human trafficking. I knew about kidnapping, what kidnapping means. But, like we said, there’s a lot of people who are trafficked, but they don’t know they are trafficked. If there’s somebody who is new to this topic, what would you say are some of the signs that lean towards being trafficked. Maybe a 15 year old on TikTok comes across this, what would you say to look out for when it comes to being groomed into trafficking.
AB: I think that’s where most of our issues are coming from, because the traffickers are going to the poor communities, to a 15 year old girl, who will have sex, because she’s at that right age; she will, – do whatever, because she wants that cell phone, she wants those braids, she wants those shoes, the clothes and her parents can’t afford it. So, you take a community of 100 people who can’t afford, every one of those little girls might be human trafficked for some reason – to be given something. There were a lot of children, just verbally, and even older women, ja, we’ll take that from that person because I’m going to get something.
PS: The thing is, everything that is free is not actually free. At the end of the day, it ends up being used against you. I say this because I see it within gangsterism: you get given all this stuff – ooh, nice shoes, or, a nice shirt, – and the next minute they ask you to go and do something for them. If you refuse, they say, hey! You owe us – remember these things that were given to you. So now they have something they can use against you and you end up doing something stupid, that makes you part of the gang. That’s grooming – I know people are generous, but not everyone is generous in a poor community for the sake of being generous. I think sometimes its used as a hook – soften people up and then pull them in.
AB: The generosity in communities comes from when people bring 2nd hand goods and we share them out – someone needs this, or someone needs that, a cupboard or whatever the case is. But grooming a youngster, boys and girls, – it’s so easy. In my opinion, there’s also a lot of boredom where they kids don’t have structure. I wish all children could stay after school and do sports, and extra-mural activities – do something. Schools and me, – I’ve always wanted to change the schools, everything.
PS: You’re right – I remember when I was at primary school, and high school, two things that were very important at that age was art and sports. Those are the things which actually prevented – shall I say, me – from doing a lot of dumb stuff, because I was always busy. I was always active. I was always doing something: a bored child is a naughty child.
AB: Completely. And also, because your adrenaline is then moving, you don’t have negative thoughts, you’re not bored in any way: You’re tired afterwards, and you’re hungry, and you feel like you’ve done something. If you can get children to play – properly play. But now when you drive through a community, and you see what’s going on in the streets, its . . .
PS: Children are growing too quickly – I see kids now begging on the streets.
AB: And if you say no, they give you O2.
PS: But also that – it’s like, seeing a child begging on the streets, for me, it tells me how easy it is to traffick. I remember this guy – I will never forget what he did: he used to be a gangster – I was talking to him about gangsterism, and we were talking about human trafficking as well – and he said, I’m going to show you how easily I got into this thing. We went to Muizenberg, – these boys were playing and begging. He said – Yo, come here. Do you know what those kids did – they jumped into my car. Because he said, I’m going to take you guys out for food. These kids don’t know me. They don’t know him. Then we took those kids to Spur and we had something to eat. And he looked at me – I was shocked the whole time – – these kids don’t know me, they don’t know him, and he said, this is how I got into it. Somebody invited me, they gave me something when I was desperate and then after that they started to teach me – and it started with my stomach. And then it lead to me being a gangster. I was shocked. But I realised that desperate people do desperate things I guess. For me, seeing a child on the street shows me it is very easy to traffick children. Also, easy to traffick adults, because, there’s also a thing where you see people on the side of the road for someone to give them a job. Then you see a truck will stop, and they will rush into the truck – they don’t know where they are going, or what they’re going to do, they don’t know how much they’re going to be paid . . . and I’m like, this is so easy.
AB: And where are their roots that they can just . . . Its just so sad. The young women who were my clients would stand on one of the street corners and then their boyfriends would force them to go and do something with somebody to get some tik. Just from one corner to the next corner there was stuff happening all the time.
PS: Some of the scenarios that we see a lot of times in Cape Town – when people say that people on the street choose to be on the street, I’m like, . . . I don’t know about that! Because I know that there is a pimp who sends those guys to go and beg, and all that money goes to that person. Imagine paying rent, although being homeless. That’s the reality of some of the people who stay on the street – that they are trafficked, to stay and be on the street. But also, there’s an element of . . . I told somebody – who are the security companies of people who stay on the street. It’s the gangsters. Security companies don’t protect homeless people, police don’t protect homeless people, the law enforcement hates homeless people. You know who loves these people – the gangsters. Because we protect you, you move things for us. It’s not very often that police will search a homeless person, but sometimes they use homeless people to move their things around. Then we arrest them and say they are the criminal, but we don’t realise they are the victim – and the puppet that’s being used either to spot somebody’s car, or to spot somebody’s house, or even to do something stupid. So sometimes people think very far of where this thing is, but it is, literally, on the street, and we see it every day. But I think we live in a society that says that is their problem, it is not my problem. I want to speak with you about poverty and unemployment – what are some of the things you think contibutes to human trafficking from your experience.
AB: Poverty – 100%. And the lack of hope of economic stability. Because, yet again, children after children being born and born and more children and more children – society is just too big – there’s no stopping. And then, lack of education, so what kind of jobs, – you know, there’s just that level where everyone just stops. Why aren’t people from Ocean View the doctors and the lawyers and the butchers or whatever – why does it just stop. There are a lot of smart people – they just let their circumstances . . . they don’t believe – that self-esteem, that lack of . . . Or do they feel exploited because of the community they live in: just actually feel like they’re being exploited.
PS: One of the things you spoke about is how sometimes the work that we’re doing is band aid after band aid, we’re not doing surgery on these issues – we’re putting a band aid and a band aid. Somebody told me, Phinius, if you put a band aid, you’re making money out of peoples’ traumas. Of course we don’t want these people to heal because if they heal, then we are unemployed. So of course we’re going to make sure they stay where they are because them being where they are makes us relevant. For me, it’s one of those systemic things: do we . . . is the problem the kids or is the problem the system. Is the problem our educational system, our social system and approaches or is the problem the people we work with on the street. How do you work with what I call ‘the seed in the soil’. How do you work with the seed in the soil to make sure these things actually have a very good relationship because sometimes I feel – that’s enough with blaming poor people for being poor and blaming homeless people for being homeless. What is causing them to end up there. What is actually causing somebody to even traffick someone else. Or to even be trafficked. Shouldn’t we be dealing with – which is a huge subject you mentioned – their education. What are some of the systems that you believe and think we need to change, – if we go back to your field.
AB: Well, the entire social system, and the justice system, too, that gave us quite a hard time and obviously the educational. We used to have arguments with the educational heads, because, sending kids home . . . So I said, instead of them doing detention, then they must come to me, to my group so that they can actually learn something. Because what is detention actually doing for them. You’ve got to get into the psyche of these kids and their behaviour – and their behaviour is from a need. So, what’s the need. And work backwards a bit.
PS: What is the need – what do you think is the need, because I don’t think every child is born rebellious.
AB: They’re not. There’s a lot of need for bonding, and love, and for the family unit to be strong, with some kind of hierarchy of sorts. Because, – and not every family – but so much when you’re in a community like this, – either the fathers’ are just drunk and abusing everybody, or the mother’s the drunk and abusing the father and then the children, so many children, and they’re all just all over the place – what happens when you go home to that every day. That’s a layer upon a layer upon a layer. That’s why therapy is taking those layers off.
PS: As you’re speaking you are reminding me of the saying: the opposite of addiction is human connection.
AB: Of course – it’s one or the other. Because without that connection you’re so vulnerable.
PS: When you speak about the family unit, again you’re taking me back to statistics, because most people who end up homeless, who end up in prison, who end up with mental health problems, come from single parent homes. You spoke a little bit about the father in that unit – how important is that.
AB: I don’t know if it’s ‘old mentality’ but I know my Dad, he was a detective, and he never came home and was ‘the man’ – you know, he was such a gentleman, but we always knew that when he was home, that everything was secure. There was that sense of security. I think the children growing up, because most children stay with their mums, that the sense of security, because mums, we all as women, are so much more emotional. If you look at a full family, no divorce, no nothing, mostly everyone is ok. I’m not saying everyone – we’re human beings and we’ve also got our own genes and stuff that happens to our brains, but they’re mostly ok, and can get through life because you’ve had those roots. So, what went wrong.
PS: I do agree with you, because I grew up without my father, I never met my father before, and I was raised by a woman – I gave my mother a lot of grey hair.
AB: Look at you today – doing amazing work.
PS: Even though I was raised by probably more than 3, 4, women, I’ve always seen the need for a father. Because I knew there was a void inside of me that I could feel, that’s of natural, but in terms of discipline, I need a father, you know. That’s why I had to pretty much pursue a lot of males to be my mentors, because I realised that if I’m going to be raised only by women, I’m going to become a little bit embarrassed. Because, at my core, ja, they can raise me into a boy, but I think to bring a man out of a boy is just different.
AB: It is. I love that you’re saying it, because its so real, people must just accept that. Because this is how it started – a man and a woman.
PS: Its just that, that void inside of us is there. You can’t fill it with money, you can’t fill it with sex, you can’t fill it with drugs. Its just so big and so wide that anything you try to fill it with, I think just makes it bigger and bigger and bigger. Going back to human trafficking – is there anything that you’d like, maybe guardians or people that work with vulnerable children, that they can be more sensitive. Because I think social workers have compassion. You know, if somebody wants to pursue the field that you’re in as a social worker, as a counsellor, what kind of a heart requires that and what are the boundaries as well, because I also know being a social worker can lead to burn out.
AB: I think that I personally probably shouldn’t be in the field, because I couldn’t stop when the rules say – its time, or you can’t go that extra mile, because that’s not my nature. So I don’t really fit into that mould of, well, this is what my supervisor says that’s all I’m allowed to do. I’m dealing with a human being, and if that human being . . .
PS: You’re not dealing with a project, you’re dealing with a human being.
AB: So, on a personal level, I have a very positive personality, and I have a huge amount of natural empathy, so I thought that I was actually quite a good social worker. But I don’t know if social work, in the field, was so good for me, although, I got up every day and I loved my job. You’ve got to want to do that, you’ve got to want to feel, – you’ve got to feel it. I have met social workers that I don’t even know how they even think that they’re enjoying their job because they’re just not . . .
PS: Unfortunately some people end up leaving it, because you end up with one social worker dealing 10 homeless people, or 100 homeless people in a shelter. How do you do that.
AB: Its impossible. We go back to the departments – why are they so top heavy, what are those top heavy people doing when we’re all on the ground and not getting the right support.
PS: I told somebody that you can’t police trauma – you can put it in prison, you then even making it even worse. I strongly agree with you that we need more social interventions in our communities. I would say that we need more social workers and counsellors than therapists and rehabs in poor communities that are accessible and affordable.
AB: We had one educational social worker, one person that went to all the schools. How insane is that, – in the southern suburbs, one. Who even makes that stuff up.
PS: Imagine having a social worker and a counsellor in every school.
AB: There should be 5 social workers, or 10 socials workers, in every school, because the teachers have to become social workers, and then they burn out because . . . I’m super passionate about this. Because how do you break a cycle if you don’t put systems in place.
PS: Holistic systems.
AB: When you go to grade R or grade 1, and you come from a dysfunctional family, and you don’t ever talk about it at school because there’s no one to talk about it to – no one talks about it. And I’m not saying there isn’t . . . there are teachers I salute completely. But, they don’t have the capacity because they’re meant to be teaching. Surely, when you put a whole bunch of people into a classroom, you know that there’s a whole bunch of social stuff going on. So, grab it and those moments when you can just lift that child, you will make a big difference where those youngsters that see me now, and they go, and they’re working. That’s what counts.
PS: The same thing – we’re raising intelligent kids who are not caring. You know, we care so much about ‘grades’ that we don’t care about the emotional intelligence that comes with being human. And there’s the thing of shut up, suck it up, don’t cry. For me, in the long term. I don’t think that’s very helpful. I think having social workers in schools who care more about the soul than the grades – of course, some teachers can focus on the grades, but we need somebody that cares about well being of the learners as much as somebody else who is caring about their well-doings because, when you want performance so much, we don’t reward ‘being’. For me, if a child is failing at school, its not because they’re dumb: . . . I don’t know how I woke up, my parents were probably fighting, and I didn’t have food and who do I talk to. Its stuff like that – when you have social workers and people like you in those spaces, you get to interact with the child, not from a policing point of view, because a lot of times, its – the child reacts, let’s call the police. But who’s going to counsel those kids.
AB: And, teaching those children those skills of how to cope. I have a friend whose daughter is being bullied at one of the local schools, and the teacher just says, man up, just get on with it. It’s just not okay because that child now doesn’t want to go to school every morning and she was a good – had good grades, now one of her grades dropped and she doesn’t want to be there.
PS: Because they don’t feel safe.
AB: Exactly. Now if there were more people to help that teacher, to help that situation, then . . . Now, that little boy who is bullying her, you wonder what he’s coming from. If some one just sat with him at this young tender age of 10 and said what’s going on, let’s turn this around and taught them to be friends again, that would be a lesson of value in that experience. But now it’s just been – oh shut up, get on with it. And that little boy probably got . . . ‘don’t do it again’.
PS: I told somebody that kids who bully other kids they are bullied somewhere else.
AB: Of course, always, – like abuse.
PS: That child is not bullying . . . like the expression: hurting people hurt people – that child is bleeding, but turns that bleeding on somebody else.
AB: That’s my point – instead of hearing why that child’s behaving like that, they just shout, or,
PS: We punish them. One last thing – a word of encouragement for maybe parents who could be listening to this; a young person could be listening to this who’s hearing for the first time how vulnerable kids are when it comes to human trafficking. I think we have established key important things about how important counselling is, how important it is to allow children to express their emotions, that they don’t need to be punished; how much we need to change the system; how much trafficking is so close to us and not far off. What are words of encouragement, because it is also a dark .
There has to be some joy.
AB: I think Phinias, if children – or youngsters or teenagers, also older women, men – the light would be to educate what is going on around them, educate themselves, because whether you get hit by a car or you get human trafficked, you’ve got to be aware. So become aware, and people like us can put up banners and walk with loud speakers but the folk who are actually the vulnerable ones, they need to . . . we have to get to them to be aware and not be afraid to rush off to somebody – it doesn’t matter who it is, you’ve got to tell somebody. You have to find the courage to tell somebody.
PS: I also appreciate that its not just the victims, but the perpetrators are also victims. We counsel the victim, but do nothing with the perpetrator, just expect them to fix themselves, by themselves, without intervention. That’s why for me, the work we do in prison is, like – yes I understand we do have to help the victims – but the perpetrator also needs help. Because, if he doesn’t learn, he’s probably going to do worse. The cycle continues if we don’t cut it. Thank you so much, really. Thank you so much for sharing your heart. I can see – I can feel the passion. Thank you for the work that you have been doing – I pray that the baton gets passed on to someone at some time to continue with this work because, like we said, we need more social workers, we need psychologists and therapists. Therapy needs to be a normal thing: just like somebody goes to the gym, or they go to the dentist, it should be so normal for somebody to say, hey, I’m going to service my soul. Thank you so much for being a part of this.
AB: Thank you, its been an absolute pleasure, and I truly believe that Free to Fly is just – has the most amazing group of people that will make such a difference, and we can get to those schools, and get to the youngsters.
Dear friends and key stakeholders, thank you for joining us on today’s podcast. Our aim, and heart, for these podcasts is to raise awareness about human trafficking and to highlight the atrocity that this crime is to humanity. A reminder that human trafficking is a multi-billion-dollar industry which is, sadly, the fastest growing, world-wide, and second biggest crime after drugs. It is far more organised that many care to believe, We invite you to join hands in fighting against human trafficking. Follow us on our social media pages at freetofly.org.za on Instagram and on Facebook, \freetoflyza. Do check out our website at www.freetofly.org.za. To sign up to be a volunteer or donate towards the building and running of our safe house for children who have come out of human trafficking. For those of you who do not know, Free to Fly is an organisation that is currently starting up the first safe house in South Africa for children who have been rescued from human trafficking. Our heart is to run a holistic, trauma-informed, survivor-informed program that will facilitate this journey of healing. Please follow our journey on our website. Till next time, take care and be sure to share and listen out for the next podcast. Thanks, friends.
Free To Fly can’t be held liable about the content of our podcast guests.
