Determining the efficacy of available counter-trafficking strategies is just as important as understanding the phenomenon of human trafficking itself. This is so if anti-trafficking practitioners wish to make inroads in preventing and combating human trafficking in South Africa. At the heart of the matter are the ways in which counter-trafficking governance is structured in the South African context. In this article we use the KwaZulu-Natal intersectoral task team, an unresourced agency of provincial government mandated to prevent and combat human trafficking, as a case study to analyse the '4P model' of countertrafficking favoured in South Africa. We find that while such an integrated model has great potential, issues of institutional cooperation and coordination, pervasive public official corruption and budgetary constraints hamper its current impact and efficacy. We conclude that these issues must be addressed by South African policy-makers once legislation has been promulgated. policy framework, which is only expected to come into force in July 2015. Counter-trafficking in the interim is devolved to un-resourced provincial task teams. The first human trafficking task team formed for this purpose was the KwaZulu-Natal human trafficking, prostitution, pornography and brothels task team (KZN task team) which was established in October 2008. Lauded by South African anti-trafficking practitioners as one of the most successful task teams in the country, its '4P model', based on prevention, protection, prosecution and partnerships, has been widely emulated. Using the KwaZulu-Natal intersectoral task team as a case study we analyse the efficacy of this counter-trafficking model within the context of current counter-trafficking governance in South Africa. Methodology We employ an interpretive/phenomenological approach to social science and a corresponding qualitative methodology. Semi-structured interviews and participant observation was employed for this study. Fifty-five interviews were conducted with counter-trafficking role players across South Africa. In addition, access was granted for observations of the KwaZulu-Natal task team. All interviewees were offered confidentiality as a condition of the interviews. The data generated was applied to the case study to analyse the efficacy of its counter-trafficking model. While parallels and variations may be observed across provincial task teams, our focus is the KwaZulu-Natal task team. This article represents one of the first efforts to analyse the counter-trafficking governance model employed in South Africa at a provincial level. Counter-trafficking governance in South Africa The sheer complexity and pervasiveness of human trafficking means that governments are ill-equipped to deal with the phenomenon on their own. Entrenched centralised, hierarchical patterns of power and decision-making, the hallmark of traditional bureaucracies, renders them largely ineffectual in addressing unconventional threats. Indeed, human trafficking as a complex social problem necessitate...

In the year following South Africa's first inclusive democratic national elections, Nelson Mandela (1995) famously proclaimed that: 'There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.' As a new democracy, South Africa has had to grapple with high levels of interpersonal violence attributed to post-conflict societies. Harris (n.d.) suggests that '[w]hile the past still impacts on present forms of violence, new trends, targets and perpetrators have also emerged within South Africa's democratic-era (some in direct response to democratisation itself).' Unfortunately, children are often its silent victims. Despite expansive child protection laws, which seem to have had little impact on the prevalence of crimes committed against them and by them, children remain objects of exclusion. Hsiao et al. (2018) found that while children were disproportionately affected by high levels of violence, political and financial investment to address this remained low. Much violence against children remains unreported and unrecorded (Optimus Study 2016), due in part to the culture of silence that pervades our society. Using the recent spate of child abductions and missing children cases, which have caught popular attention and sparked moral outrage, we examine the issue of missing children in South Africa within the wider phenomenological framework of violence against children. Over the past 18 years, approximately 16 000 children have been reported missing. 25 percent of these children have never been found. This does not include the number of cases that are not reported to authorities. While statistics only provide a snapshot of the problem, we interrogate the cases of the 'missing' missing using data from our own research, Missing Children South Africa and the South African Police Service. Using an interpretive approach, we reflect on our lived experiences working in a network of state Monique Emser & Marcel van der Watt 90and civil society stakeholders engaging with such cases. We conclude that missing children cases are intricately intertwined with the layers of violence that have become embedded in South African society in the democratic era. We offer a series of policy recommendations to address this complex issue.

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