A Call To Action: Civil Society, Communities, Business and All-of-Government must, as an imperative, work together to ensure that children can grow up in safe, loving and sustainable families in communities.
As we celebrate the Day of the African Child, Child Protection Month and Youth Month in June, the recently released crime statistics which brings stark evidence of increasing violence, abuse and suffering must act as an imperative for joint, coordinated action.
We need to Work Together, Communicate and Share data and information as Civil Society, Communities, Business and Government to develop AND IMPLEMENT a comprehensive, responsive, coordinated, data-driven, efficient community-based and driven prevention and early intervention model; otherwise continue to face the relentless brutal murder, assault and abuse of women and children in South Africa.
Child protection must be an all-of-government imperative, supported by specialist service delivery of the NGO sector, building on community strengths and skills and funded, in part, by the corporate sector. We carry a collective responsibility to make sure that our vulnerable populations are, in practice, protected and supported to live without fear, learn without fear and enjoy a full, happy life.
Warehousing children in institutions is not the panacea to the complete failure of SA society to protect and nurture its children. Placing children into institutions where they become a ‘case-file’ and grow up without love, without identity, without voice and without hope is to deprive each of those children of a positive, sustainable future.
That is perhaps the worst fate that can befall a child. Doomed to grow up as a number in a broken system without hope for a future.
Our collective failure to invest resources and action into a coordinated, monitored, evidence-based, efficient, responsive and inclusive community-based Prevention and Early Intervention model, directly leads to desperate professionals on the ground resorting to ‘rescue and remove’ of children at risk, convinced that institutions are safer than families living in communities.
We ignore the increasing evidence that despite our progressive child protection legislation and the cutting-edge human rights protection as enshrined in Section 28(b) of the Constitution of South Africa; the implementation gap between these impressive legal instruments and practice leaves the most vulnerable in our communities unprotected.
The release of the quarterly crime statistics on the 3rd of June is clarion call to action as we celebrate the Day of the African Child in June, which is also earmarked ‘Child Protection’ month.
In the period from January to March 2022, South Africa recorded the following:
- 6083 murders, of which murders of children increased by 37.2% or 306 children (younger than 17 years) and 17.5% or 898 women. In just three months.
- 10818 people were raped – in just three months. This is an increase of 13.7%.
- 4653 of these rapes took place at the home of the rape victim or at the home of the rapist.
- In just three months, there were 3306 kidnappings, an increase of 109.2%.
- Assault with the intention to do grievous bodily harm – 1937 children under 17 years of age, in just three months.
According to Minister Bheki Cele, Minister of Police these shocking increases in violent crimes can be attributed to the ‘triple challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment, increasingly encouraged opportunistic criminal behaviour’.
According to Maite Nkoane-Mashabane (Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities) these searing statistics are “..the tip of the iceberg, the reality being many continue to suffer from extreme forms of violence, in silence.”
True words. Many policies and plans. Much awareness raising in communities. No effective action.
As civil society, we embark on child protection awareness raising events at this time of year. Fun-runs, handing out pamphlets, exhorting communities to be aware of child protection. And while we are busy doing this, women and children continue to suffer extreme violence, torture and death.
The media reports are legion;
“A 6-year old girl is killed, her womb and knees removed.”
“Rape and sexual exploitation of a 2-year old boy by a 52-year old man.”
“Durban mother arrested for allegedly killing her 3-year old daughter with a wooden rolling-pin.
“Gauteng father fatally poisons three of his four children with an energy drink.’
“In March, the Free State court handed a life sentence to a father who murdered his son to spite the boy’s mother’
In the early hours of Sunday morning, 26th June, 22 children and young people between the ages of 13 and 19 years died at a tavern in Scenery Park, East London. The cause of their deaths is being investigated. The children were apparently celebrating the end of exams.
Now they lie in the government morgue, with parents standing in queues to identify the bodily remains of their children.
There is truly nothing positive or hopeful to celebrate this month; if anything, there is an imperative to act and to call on all of South Africa to act.
In the words of Nelson Mandela, ‘There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children’.
There is no shortage of excellent models of practice in our country. We have some of the most progressive child protection legislation globally. We have thousands of policies, the outputs of brilliant minds focused on finding an effective solution to address the human tragedy that is evident in our crime stats. We have thousands of qualified professionals and highly skilled paraprofessionals all working hard to create better conditions for the most vulnerable on the ground. Much of this work is done on shoe-string budgets at great personal cost to the brave, committed people doing the real work.
Given this, we should be leaders globally in the protection of human rights. We should be leading the growing regional momentum for a deinstitutionalized child protection system. We have all the building-blocks in place, starting with the strong foundation of the Children’s Act 38 (2005) as Amended 41 (2007).
We are not. As is grimly evidenced by the situation of vulnerable children and families living the South African reality every day.
While it is a complex problem, perhaps a first step towards a better outcome would be for government to lead from the front with coordination, support, data-driven planning, rational budgeting and quality assurance driving actual implementation.
Without this, it would be permissible to ask whether there is real political will to prioritize child protection and the promotion of human rights.
Without real political will evidenced in measurable outcomes, it would appear that we are in the hands of a government talking the talk but not willing to walk the walk, while publicly noting the hundreds of women and children who die every month and the hundreds of thousands who suffer increasing hunger, growing unemployment, rivers of sewage running through streets and into the waterways, erratic power supply, too few secure, basic housing units, a failed health system and erratic medicine supplies, and a failing education system.
Perhaps the worst indictment of all is that this is a country where children are ‘rescued’ from the killing fields only to be placed into institutions, where they become just another number amongst thousands of other ‘numbers’ and are robbed of the last vestiges of hope and a positive future.
Lourenza Steytler Foghill
Country Director
One Child One Family, HHC South Africa.
27th June 2022.