[3] In 2018, Burundi was a source country for children and possibly women subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically conditions of involuntary domestic servitude and forced prostitution.
Children and young adults may also have been coerced into forced labor on plantations or small farms in southern Burundi, or to conduct informal commerce in the streets.
Forced labour of children and adults was also very common in mines due to a large market for valuable stones and ores.
Some traffickers may have ben family or acquaintances of victims who, under the pretext of assisting underprivileged children with education or with false promises of lucrative jobs, subjected them to forced labor, most commonly as domestic servants.
While there was little evidence of large-scale child prostitution, “benevolent” older females offered vulnerable younger girls room and board within their homes, and in some cases eventually pushed them into prostitution to pay for living expenses; extended family members also financially profited from the commercial sexual exploitation of young relatives residing with them.
In August 2009, police arrested a Burundian man for kidnapping six boys between the ages of 12 and 13 and transporting them to Tanzania for forced labor in tobacco fields.
The suspect's provisional release was revoked after an appeal from the prosecutor's office, and he remains in pre-trial detention in Rutana Province prison.
Throughout 2009, the Women and Children's Brigade, a specialized police unit, successfully identified and rescued 10 of 17 child victims exploited by an international prostitution ring and returned them to their families; the alleged traffickers have not been arrested due to a lack of concrete evidence.
In January 2010, police charged three men and their landlord with corruption of minors and incitement to debauchery after the former were found pimping underage girls from a rental house; the prosecution remained in the pre-trial stage at the end of the reporting period.
As a result of this mandate, police initiated a crackdown on clandestine brothels that housed potential trafficking victims in January 2010, shutting down three small hotels in the industrial quarter of Bujumbura.
The COVID-19 pandemic also made the prosecution of traffickers difficult because lockdown prevented officials from obtaining witness statements.
[8] In January 2010, police rescued three child sex trafficking victims from a brothel in Bujumbura, documented their testimonies, and returned them to their families.
In January 2010, Burundi's Interpol office assisted the government in repatriating a 15-year-old Burundian boy from Rwanda where he was forced to work as a domestic servant.
In cooperation with Tanzanian police, the government repatriated six Burundian child trafficking victims from Tanzania in July 2009.
Between April and June, the National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration oversaw the demobilization and short-term care of the final 380 child soldiers from the Forces Nationale de Libération (FNL) rebel group and from among alleged FNL dissidents in the Randa and Buramata sites.
The pre-deployment anti-trafficking training for Burundian peacekeepers, provided by a foreign government, included a curriculum that created awareness and discouraged acts of trafficking and sexual exploitation.