The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a source and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically conditions of forced labor and forced prostitution. The majority of this trafficking is internal, and much of it is perpetrated by armed groups and government forces outside government control within the DRC's unstable eastern provinces.
The Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so. The government did not show evidence of progress in prosecuting and punishing labor or sex trafficking offenders, including members of its own armed forces, providing protective services for the vast majority of trafficking victims, or raising public awareness of human trafficking. In addition, the government's anti-trafficking law enforcement efforts decreased during the 2010 reporting period.
Realms
A significant number of unlicensed Congolese artisanal miners – men and boys – are exploited in situations of debt bondage by businessmen and supply dealers from whom they acquire cash advances, tools, food, and other provisions at inflated prices, and to whom they must sell the mined minerals at prices below the market value. The miners are forced to continue to work to repay constantly accumulating debts that are virtually impossible to repay. In North Kivu, South Kivu, and Katanga provinces, armed groups and Congolese national army (FARDC) troops reportedly use threats and coercion to force men and children to mine for minerals.
A number of policemen in eastern DRC reportedly arrested people arbitrarily in order to extort money from them. Those who could not pay were forced to work until they had "earned" their freedom. Congolese girls are forced into prostitution in tent- or hut-based brothels or informal camps – including in markets and mining areas – by loosely organized networks, gangs, and madams. Congolese women and children are exploited internally in conditions of involuntary domestic servitude and taken, in smaller numbers, to Angola, South Africa, Republic of the Congo, and European nations for commercial sexual exploitation. Some members of Batwa, or pygmy groups, are subjected to conditions of involuntary servitude in agriculture, mining, and domestic work in eastern DRC.
Indigenous and foreign armed militia groups, notably, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), Patriotes Résistants Congolais (PARECO), various local militia (Mai-Mai), the Alliance of Patriots for a Free and Sovereign Congo (APCLS), and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), continued to abduct and forcibly recruit Congolese men, women, and children to serve as laborers, porters, domestics, combatants, and in sexual servitude. In 2009, the LRA continued operations in areas in and near the DRC's Orientale Province, violently abducting more than 1,700 Congolese citizens, including children. Some of these abductees were later taken to southern Sudan or the Central African Republic. Likewise, abducted Sudanese and Central African citizens experienced conditions of forced labor and sexual servitude at the hands of the LRA after being forcibly taken to the DRC.
In 2009, the FARDC resumed recruitment, at times through force, of children for use as combatants, escorts, and porters, a practice which observers believed to have ended by 2008. From November 2008 to October 2009, 623 confirmed cases of unlawful child soldier recruitment were attributed to the FARDC, 75 percent of which were attributable to ex-CNDP (National Congress for the Defense of the People, a former Congolese rebel group) elements absorbed into the FARDC in 2009. In April 2009, for example, 100 children, ages 13 to 15, were recruited by the FARDC along the Bunyakiri-Hombo axis.
An unspecified number of children recruited by the CNDP during past reporting periods remain within integrated FARDC units. In addition, FARDC elements pressed hundreds of civilians, including children, into forced labor to carry ammunition, supplies, and looted goods, to fetch water and firewood, to serve as guides, or to construct military facilities and temporary huts. Those who resisted were sometimes killed. Others died under the weight of their heavy loads.