by Robyn Wolfson Vorster | Dec 8, 2023 | Abandonment
Gauteng Social Development’s October ban of baby savers as a place to relinquish babies followed 10 years of advocacy by civil society to prevent unsafe abandonment. Government terms it ‘child protection’, but given the number of children dying or left disabled when babies are abandoned in rubbish dumps, disgusting pit latrines or the open veld, who is this protecting? Instead, baby savers should be considered an essential service.
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In October 2023, the Gauteng Department of Social Development (DSD) issued a directive to Child and Youth Care Centres (CYCCs), as well as private temporary safe care homes, declaring all baby savers in the province illegal, ordering them to close with immediate effect, and threatening legal action for those organisations that do not comply.
Baby savers are mechanical boxes attached to CYCCs, places of safety or crisis pregnancy centres where a mother who is experiencing a crisis pregnancy, who cannot or will not raise the child and isn’t able to place that child into the child protection system, can safely relinquish the child as an alternative to unsafe abandonment. Based on the ancient practice of foundling wheels, they are designed to provide a last resort safe haven for vulnerable infants.
Dr Yolande van der Hyde, a senior pathologist at the Observatory Forensic Pathology Institute, recreated an autopsy she had just performed on a dead abandoned baby. She said that many abandoned children were not born dead, but took a breath before they died.
South Africa has the distinction of having the first modern baby saver in the world. Situated at the Door of Hope, it’s been operational since 1999. Based in Gauteng, the baby saver, which has rescued 270 infants over the last 24 years, is one of those ordered to close.
No response
At the time of publishing, the DSD had failed to respond to questions posed to it about its motivation for issuing the directive, the extent and impact of abandonment and DSD’s strategy for preventing it. However, its position has been well articulated, both in the directive and interviews given by Yvonne Deonarin, Director Children Protection Services: Gauteng DSD on radio, television and news media since news of the directive broke in mid-October.
In a nutshell, the department’s position is that safe relinquishment through baby savers:
- Is a form of abandonment, which is a criminal offence in the Children’s Act.
- Encourages abandonment.
- Is not in the best interests of a child.
- Denies the child’s right to a name, family, social, cultural and religious identity.
- “Silences the voice” of the child’s biological father.
- Creates a caseload of “abandoned children”.
- Is linked to illegal adoption and trafficking.
It further argues that baby savers are unnecessary because babies can be relinquished at the DSD’s offices, at clinics, hospitals and police stations, and that it has no knowledge of the organisations running baby savers.
They are important points, but to date, no one has been able to debate them publicly. Nor has the department veered off script to respond to any of the counter-arguments raised by child protection experts from Baby Savers South Africa (BSSA), the Teddy Bear Clinic, and Women & Men Against Child Abuse. The issues are therefore worth interrogating, particularly because what is missing from the department’s argument is as significant as what is included.
Notably absent is an appreciation of the desperation of abandoning parents, and recognition of the extent and impact of abandonment.
The department has never publicly acknowledged that more abandoned babies die than survive, and that those who survive are often left physically scarred or with trauma-related psychological challenges. In Deonarin’s recent interviews she also downplayed the numbers of babies surviving abandonment. Stating that the Gauteng DSD only had records of 13 babies abandoned in the province between April and September, she said that the department was not aware of the “thousands of babies being abandoned annually”.
Deonarin’s comment insinuates that the numbers are either overstated, or that the abandoned children are being received by baby savers but not placed into the child protection system, but instead trafficked through illegal adoption for financial gain.
However, the department knows the origins of the statistic. It’s derived from Dr Dee Blackie’s 2013 master’s thesis on abandonment. Blackie used figures provided by child protection organisations such as child welfare to calculate that 3,500 babies survived abandonment in 2010.
In the absence of any other formal research on the topic, including by the DSD, Blackie’s statistic has been cited ever since.
Nor is it likely to be inaccurate. In March 2022, in response to a question posed by the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Social Development about how many babies had been abandoned in the years since Blackie’s research, national DSD sought to answer the question by conducting informal research across CPOs in each province, rather than referring to Part A of the child protection register, which should include an accurate tally of the number of babies surviving abandonment in the period.
A baby saver, also referred to as a baby box or baby safe, is a structure built into a wall where mothers can leave infants as a safe alternative to baby abandonment. (Photo: Whitney Rosenberg)
Babies that survived abandonment
Numbers provided were incomplete (there was no data from the Northwest Province, and limited information from others such as KwaZulu-Natal). But the combined total of 10,500 babies that survived abandonment over the period is substantial. Moreover, the Minister of Social Development told Parliament that 1,024 babies had been abandoned from April 2019 to March 2021 alone.
There’s no minimising the problem. Deonarin herself admitted in a November 2022 TV interview that “the prevalence of child abandonment is on the increase” and that those abandonments included babies “put into packets or dropped off in a nearby field”.
It’s also been flagged by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. In 2022, after the committee received South Africa’s five-yearly report from government, and shadow reports from civil society, it specifically highlighted abandonment and its prevalence on its list of concerns needing more investigation.
In 2023 to date, there were 86 stories written about abandoned babies. Two thirds (57) were found dead, in rubbish bins, pit toilets, in buckets, on train tracks, in plastic bags, the veld, on the street, in an oven, in the mouths of animals, and in one devastating headline, strangled and being eaten by a dog.
But while the number of children who survive abandonment every year is significant, until government recognises how fatal unsafe abandonment can be, it will always understate abandonment figures.
One of the unanswered questions posed to Deonarin for this article was “how many abandoned babies die annually?” Her silence wasn’t unexpected. The number of abandoned babies that die is not formally tracked by the SAPS or through forensic pathology labs.
As a result, these children are completely invisible.
Completely invisible
Child protection activist Luke Lamprecht however says that when he was researching abandonment, one Johannesburg mortuary recorded 20 dead abandoned babies every month for every six found alive. Lamprecht’s figure, amounting to an intake in one mortuary of 240 babies per year dying through unsafe abandonment, infanticide or neonaticide, was confirmed by Dr Jena Stuart, Chief Specialist Forensic Pathologist at Gauteng Department of Health’s Forensic Pathology Services. She says that the problem is “spiralling out of control” and placing the health sector in crisis.
A 2009 child homicide study completed for the Medical Research Council included 454 children under the age of five who died of unnatural causes. Of these children, 233 (53%) died in the first six days of life, prompting the researchers to conclude that in South Africa, children under five were most likely to die of unnatural causes in the first six days of life and that the country has some of the highest rates of neonaticide (murder of children within the first 28 days of life: 19.6 per 100,000 live births) and infanticide (murder of babies under one: 28.4 per every 100,000 live births) in the world. In the study, 85% of the neonates died because they were abandoned in the open veld, rubbish dumps and dustbins, toilets, rivers and dams or were buried in shallow graves.
A recent Carte Blanche feature on dead abandoned babies included an interview with bone specialist Dr Roxanne Thornton, who establishes cause of death in the often decomposed bodies of abandoned babies. She identified illegal abortions, concealment of birth and infanticide as common causes of death for abandoned babies. Tragically, the babies she examines can be as old as nine months. But even then, their deaths are seldom investigated.
In the feature, Dr Yolande van der Hyde, a senior pathologist at the Observatory Forensic Pathology Institute, recreated an autopsy she had just performed on a dead abandoned baby. She said that many abandoned children were not born dead, but took a breath before they died.
But government has removed the word “abandoned” from its crime records and pathology reports. These babies are now all classified as stillborn even when there is evidence that the child was born alive and then died, or where there was blunt or sharp force trauma.
One abandoned baby survives, two die
Following their reclassification, an investigative reporter analysing the number of “stillborns” in pathology reports in Gauteng confirmed Lamprecht’s findings that in the province, for every abandoned baby that survives, two die.
Nor is the prevalence of death specific to Gauteng. Media stories from across the country show that in 2023 to date, there were 86 stories written about abandoned babies. Two thirds (57) were found dead, in rubbish bins, pit toilets, in buckets, on train tracks, in plastic bags, the veld, on the street, in an oven, in the mouths of animals, and in one devastating headline, strangled and being eaten by a dog.
These stats and stories show the deadly impact of unsafe abandonment. But the thousands that survive seldom escape unscathed either. Instead, they suffer debilitating physical and psychological injuries. It’s hardly surprising, many of the 29 children whose abandonment and survival was documented in the media in 2023 were found in drains, in municipal rubbish bins, in pit latrines and in plastic bags, including a baby rescued in Gauteng’s Sedibeng municipality during the 16 days of activism for no violence against women and children, after being sealed in a plastic bag and thrown into a river.
CYCCs and Places of Safety report that many abandoned babies have physical or psychological disabilities. These include brain injuries due to oxygen deprivation, cerebral palsy, autism, ADHD, cognitive delays, limbs and other extremities missing due to rat bites, damage to lungs due to exposure after a child was abandoned outside in winter or at night, from near drowning or breathing in faecal matter when abandoned in pit latrines, tremors due to being abandoned at the side of a highway or children plagued with night terrors because they were left in dark drains for extended periods of time, or even buried alive.
Not surprisingly, the department doesn’t acknowledge these cases. If it recognised the risk of children’s death or disability following unsafe abandonment and did not act to prevent it, it would be acting negligently at best, and potentially, even criminally.
Read more in Daily Maverick: Closure of baby savers in Gauteng will lead to more unsafe abandonments and deaths — experts
Nonetheless, the DSD is on the same page as child protection activists about many things related to unsafe abandonment. Everyone agrees that first prize is for children to be raised in their nuclear or extended families, that it’s not optimal for children to be robbed of their cultural identities, heritage or relationship with their biological fathers. They even agree that abandonment is rife and that if societal factors such as poverty, unemployment, sexual violence, teen pregnancies and the breakdown of extended family exist, so will abandonment.
Where they disagree is about if unsafe abandonment should be prevented at all costs, whether government’s efforts to stop crisis pregnancies and assist women to place their children into the child protection system are working, and if women can relinquish their babies at all DSD offices, clinics, hospitals and police stations. Activists further query if baby savers rob fathers of rights because women who abandon typically report that they’ve been sexually assaulted or abandoned by the biological father. Most importantly, civil society disagrees that abandonment is an “easy option” or that abandoning parents would abandon if they had alternatives.
Underestimating desperation is as dangerous as ignoring the extent and impact of abandonment.
Pervasive factors driving abandonment
Frustratingly, despite being aware of the factors driving abandonment – Deonarin listed many in her November 2022 interview – the department seems curiously lacking in empathy about the despair they can cause.
Moreover, government doesn’t understand that no one would deliberately risk arrest, prison, hurting or killing their child, or sacrificing any future relationship with them if they felt they had options.
Recognising that people abandon as a last resort when they cannot or will not raise a child, and when placing the child into the child protection system is either not possible or government fails to assist them, refutes the argument that safe relinquishment is an enabler allowing parents to avoid parental responsibilities. Equally, if abandonment is a certainty, it’s inevitable that the child will be separated from the extended family, from culture and from its origins.
People who use savers see abandonment as their only choice, making assertions that baby savers promote abandonment spurious. They’re instead a last resort to stop death.
Armed with that knowledge, government should recognise that banning baby savers to stop abandonment is akin to government banning lifeguards to stop people drowning.
Even when it recognises desperation, the DSD still deems savers unnecessary, arguing that parents can relinquish at DSD offices, hospitals, clinics and police stations instead. Worryingly though, some women report being “chased away” when they have tried.
Deonarin calls these “isolated incidents”. However, the Gauteng DSD was unable to provide standard operating procedures for safe relinquishment at these institutions, and when BSSA asked for them, it was allegedly told that the department was in the process of writing them.
‘Go home and parent’
In the interim, incidents of women seeking help being told to “go home and parent” abound. As recently as November, there were two separate incidents in Gauteng on the same day.
In the East Rand of Johannesburg, a desperate mother tried to relinquish her baby at a police station because she had not received help from the department. When the SAPS took the baby to the local DSD offices to get it placed into the child protection system, the department ordered the police to arrest the mother because, despite the DSD’s directive, the police were told that she wasn’t allowed to relinquish her child to them.
On the same day, in the West Rand of Johannesburg, a care worker from a place of safety escorted a mother to her local DSD offices because she wanted to place her four-month-old baby into care. The social workers apparently told her “she didn’t look poor” and sent her away. Even after a senior DSD manager intervened, the mother was told she couldn’t put her baby into the place of safety she had chosen. She left the offices with the baby. The child has since been placed into care, but without intervention, she might have abandoned her baby.
The DSD’s concerns about the potential illegality of baby savers based on the Children’s Act and the risk of trafficking through baby savers are however valid. It’s why advocacy groups have been working for years to amend the Children’s Act to allow for safe relinquishment. In March 2022, Dr Whitney Rosenberg from BSSA, whose PhD is focused on safe relinquishment, presented to the Social Development Parliamentary Portfolio Committee and explained children’s constitutional right to life and the importance of acting in their best interests. She showed how abandonment statistics necessitate a solution to end unsafe abandonment, and the impact on children of government’s failure to act.
She then presented potential amendments to the wording of the Children’s Act to be incorporated into the Children’s Amendment Bill (CAB). These would legalise safe relinquishment through baby savers while ensuring that unsafe abandonment remains a criminal offence.
But the amendments were not made in 2022. The committee’s priority was instead to pass the bill in time to meet the November 2022 deadline imposed by the North Gauteng High Court. The order compelled the DSD to provide a comprehensive legal solution to the foster care crisis, thus preventing the Minister of Social Development from being deemed to have acted unconstitutionally. The committee therefore decided to only pass the 12 foster-care related clauses, rejecting the remaining 126 clauses of the bill and effectively removing the option for new provisions in the Act to legalise baby savers.
Despite this, the department still missed its deadline, and the order had to be extended for another 12 months.
The committees’ plan was to include the remaining 126 CAB clauses in a committee bill to ensure that extensive work done on them through national and provincial public consultations wasn’t in vain. But calamitously, it discovered in May 2023 that it had been given inaccurate advice by the parliamentary law advisor who told parliamentarians that if the committee rejected the remaining clauses in the bill, they could still work on them as a committee bill.
Advocate Charmaine van der Merwe, the Senior Parliamentary Legal Advisor in the Legislative Drafting Unit, clarified that the committee should have divided the bill into two, and then passed the clauses related to foster care. This would have allowed it to deliberate on the other clauses thereafter.
Instead, when the committee rejected the 126 clauses, they were taken “off parliament’s radar”.
While the number of children who survive abandonment every year is significant, until government recognises how fatal unsafe abandonment can be, it will always understate abandonment figures. (Photo: City Press / Media 24 / Gallo)
Upshot: restart baby saver legislation
The upshot is that work on the remaining clauses and suggested provisions related to baby savers must be restarted from scratch. Moreover, if the committee revives the process now but doesn’t have time to introduce the bill in the sixth Parliament, it cannot be carried over until the seventh Parliament. The result is that the bill, along with proposed new safe relinquishment clauses, has been shelved until a new committee is formed after the 2024 elections.
The state law advisor was so appalled by the advice given that she felt duty-bound to report her colleague, an action opposed by the ANC members of the committee.
Given that the DSD was privy to these discussions and aware of the plans to amend the act (and that its inability to fix foster care led to the delay effecting the changes), it seems disingenuous for the Gauteng department to act now to close baby savers, knowing legislative changes are pending.
Equally disingenuous is its continued assertion that it’s unfamiliar with the organisations running baby savers. BSSA met with a senior director from the Gauteng DSD on 4 October and explained in detail the vision for baby savers, its member organisations, the CPOs working with each saver to ensure that children placed in savers are immediately put into the child protection system, what processes they use when a baby comes through the saver, as well as the plan, also presented to parliament, for BSSA to become a regulatory body for savers.
Acknowledging the risk of trafficking through unregulated savers, BSSA’s proposal is to register all savers who work with accredited CPOs and follow the processes dictated by the Children’s Act. This would ensure that every child placed in a saver is put into the child protection system. Equally, any saver not following the procedures would be flagged and suspended, pending compliance, or closed.
At the meeting’s end, the DSD and BSSA agreed to pursue ways of working together. But, on the same day, the DSD issued the directive to ban baby savers and make their activities illegal.
Since most baby savers are run by places of safety or CYCCs, if they defy the directive, they risk legal action, loss of funding and having their accreditation removed. But if they close, unsafe abandonment, which will continue unabated, will result in even more babies dying or being maimed. If savers are driven underground, the risk of trafficking, minimal when savers are regulated, could also become real.
Banning savers to prevent trafficking may ironically result in trafficking increasing.
Going upstream to stop abandonment at its source: addressing gender-based violence and prevention of crisis pregnancies should minimise abandonment numbers. As should options counselling and, when they are finally drafted, the implementation of safe relinquishment standard operating procedures for clinics, hospitals, police stations and DSD offices, especially if the DSD accompanies them with training, and includes the number of children relinquished into care as a performance indicator for DSD social workers.
But, government prevention and intervention programmes lack urgency and effectiveness, as attested by abandonment stats. And societal circumstances in our country and resultant desperation mean there is no end to abandonment in sight.
It’s therefore time to deal with the reality of abandonment rather than pretending that the savers are the genesis of the problem and that if abandonment numbers aren’t tracked and managed, abandonment isn’t happening.
Ignoring this scourge won’t allow government to escape the consequences if it fails to end it.
Baby savers an ‘essential service’
To quote Dr Sheheda Omar from the Teddy Bear Clinic, when you acknowledge that women who abandon feel that they have no other option, and that most abandoned babies die, it makes baby savers an “essential service”. Reinforcing that the right to life always trumps the right to identity, Omar explains that if you accept that the children placed in baby savers were going to be abandoned, not raised or placed in the child protection system, avoiding death, disability or psychological damage will always be in the child’s best interests.
It’s also in the best interests of government. Now that the UNCRC has flagged abandonment as a reporting issue, government will be required in terms of the country’s treaty obligations to track abandonments (including those that result in death) and to show progress in minimising unsafe abandonments. Moreover, if the department deliberately denies children their inalienable rights to life and dignity, they could be deemed to have acted unconstitutionally.
Government therefore needs to withdraw its directive and work with baby savers across the country to ensure that all savers are registered with BSSA and that the processes outlined in the act for placing a child into the child protection system are followed by those running savers. Further, it should expedite amendments to the Children’s Act to make safe relinquishment legal.
In the interim though, DSD intransigence is costing many of our most vulnerable their lives. It seems incomprehensible that government must be compelled to save the lives of infants, but until it ends this perpetration of violence against those with no voices to protest, the 16 days of activism for no violence against women and children is a farce. DM
First published in the Daily Maverick: 08.12.2023
by Robyn Wolfson Vorster | Jun 6, 2023 | Child Abuse, Child Protection Legislation & Child Rights, Health and Hunger
It’s the end of another Child Protection Week, proof positive of a government without a cohesive funded strategy for child protection, or anything related to children, and one seemingly unaware of the extent of the crisis.
Listen to this article: BeyondWords
If you recognised the name of government’s 2023 Child Protection Week campaign: “Let’s all protect children through Covid-19 and beyond”, it’s because it was the title of the 2022 campaign, and the 2021 one, and the 2020 one. The content on the official government website is also a copy and paste from the last three years.
It’s why when asked in an eNCA interview at the launch of the week if Covid was the most critical challenge for children, the Minister of Social Development, Lindiwe Zulu accurately replied that the campaign was developed while Covid was still a factor.
She did stress however that the “and beyond” allowed room for the week to address all the many ills our children are currently facing.
While that’s apposite, the department could have steered clear of any Covid references, given that government missed many vital opportunities to protect children during the pandemic and that children continue to be affected.
The psycho-social impact of the pandemic is still largely unmanaged. Government has also been slow to acknowledge its role in the mass closure of early childhood development centres and its failure to recognise increases in the numbers of orphans and abandoned children, or respond meaningfully to escalations in teen pregnancies, violence and exploitation, or those suffering from malnutrition and stunting.
Consequently, it might have been opportune for the Department of Social Development (DSD) to revert to its pre-Covid campaign title: “Let’s protect children to move South Africa forwards”, notable because it links the well-being of children to the future of the country.
According to activists and academics, who stress the importance of extending child protection to the prevention of a myriad of adverse childhood experiences such as hunger, poverty, poor housing, inadequate early childhood development and schooling, abandonment, deprivation of family care, violence, homicide, and a lack of opportunity, economic mobility and social capital, the picture is a bleak one.
How big is the problem?
The shadow report submitted to the African Union by the South African National Child Rights Coalition (SANCRC) and statistics and analysis compiled by the Children’s Institute, both drawing from multiple global and local studies, reveal how dire our children’s situation is.
In 2020, 62.1% of South African children lived in multiple deprivation poverty, measured by their access to combined services and support: income support, health, nutrition, water and sanitation, education, and protection.
Historically marginalised children experience much higher deprivations. In 2022, more than a third of children in South Africa lived below the food poverty line of R663 per month. This has been exacerbated by below-inflation increases for the Child Support Grant (CSG), leaving families poorer and children hungrier.
The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice & Dignity Group found that in May 2023 the CSG (R500) was 25% below the food poverty line (R663) and 45% below the average cost to secure a basic nutritious diet for a child (R901,19).
Of every 1,000 children born in South Africa, 28 die before their fifth birthday. Half of all child deaths in hospitals are associated with malnutrition. Only 23% of children between six and 23 months receive a minimum acceptable diet.
Further, 30% of boy children and 25% of girl children under the age of five are stunted, meaning that they cannot reach their full growth and development potential because of the irreversible physical and cognitive damage caused by persistent nutritional deprivation. Stunted children are more vulnerable to disease and cannot learn effectively, are more likely to drop out of school, struggle with unemployment and live in poverty as adults. Stunting exacerbates the triple challenge of unemployment, poverty and inequality that the government keeps promising to eradicate.
The Thrive by Five Index indicated that 57% of children attending an Early Learning Programme (ELP) were not on track for cognitive and, or physical development.
The World Bank’s Human Capital Index from 2021 showed that children born in South Africa today will only develop to 43% of their potential, compared to a global average of 56%. A 2015 study by Save the Children South Africa estimated that this loss of human capital equated to roughly R238-billion (about 6% of that year’s GDP).
In 2016, only 51% of 20–24-year-olds had completed matric or its equivalent. Less than 20% of children in no-fee schools achieved above the lowest international benchmark in maths.
Further, the quality of this schooling is so poor. Children who received 10.2 years of schooling have effectively only received an estimated 5.6 years. The recent Pirls report indicated that in 2021, 81% of Grade 4 learners could not read for meaning in any language. Accompanying analysis showed that many children lost up to a year of learning during the pandemic.
A year following the pandemic’s end, only the Western Cape has a learning catch-up plan.
A 2016 Optimus study found that 42% of children had experienced some form of maltreatment (whether sexual, physical, emotional or neglect), while 82% experienced victimisation (whether criminal or exposure to family or community violence).
Further, 34.4% of adolescents reported having been hit, beaten, kicked or physically hurt by an adult caregiver over their lifetime. Approximately one in every three adolescents (girls and boys) have experienced some form of sexual abuse. Community studies show far higher rates of exposure and trauma, 99% in Soweto, and 80% in Khayelitsha.
The Birth to Thirty study published in 2022 assessed a broad range of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) from physical and sexual abuse to exposure to community violence and poverty. Results indicate that 87% of children in the sample were exposed to four or more adverse childhood experiences, and that by age 18, only 9% of the sample hadn’t been exposed to a single ACE.
Some contributing factors to the problems
Civil society contends that historical challenges have been exacerbated by government’s evident failure to prioritise, plan or budget for the protection of children.
Despite government’s tacit acceptance that prioritising children is essential for the country, government’s Medium-Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) 2019–2025 which spotlights women, youth and those with disabilities, makes no mention of children.
In addition, the president’s 2023 State of the Nation Address (Sona) only included children in the context of early childhood development and gender-based violence (where violence against them is conflated with that against women, despite women often being the perpetrators).
Further, the president promised in Sona that grants would be increased to cushion the poor against inflation.
However, the national budget failed to respond to the increasing gap between the Food Poverty Line and the value of the CSG, especially as food inflation rates continue to be almost double the CPI inflation, increasing to 13.8% in January 2023. Treasury again only committed to below-inflation increases in the CSG and Foster Care Grants (FCG).
The budget made no further mention of children or their development.
While the under-resourced and inept DSD is “in the forefront” of child protection, children’s services collectively are fragmented across multiple government departments including health, home affairs, education, and justice, with an evident lack of coordination, oversight and planning from the presidency.
What can be done?
Activists suggest the following:
1 Elevate children to a strategic priority and plan, budget and resource the sector accordingly
Civil society recommends that the state, at the highest levels of the Presidency, premiers’ and mayors’ offices, acknowledge that to implement the country’s treaty responsibilities and uphold its Constitution, South Africa needs a national child rights governance system overseen by an effective and resourced Office on the Rights of the Child (ORC) located in the Presidency, but not in the Department of Women.
The achievement of children’s rights to equality, to survive and to develop to their full potential should be recognised as national development priority in the Medium-Term Strategic Framework and included in government’s Sona and Sopa addresses.
The Ministry of Finance should recognise children’s development as a national priority and budget accordingly.
Improving the outcomes for children should be monitored and authorities held accountable for failure to realise specific outcomes.
2 Eliminate ‘the slow violence of child hunger’
This requires government to recognise that it can no longer economise on the CSG or ignore the cost to the country of keeping the quantum of the grant, which studies have shown contributes to better health, nutrition and educational outcomes for children, below the food poverty line. This economising, according to Katherine Hall and Paula Proudlock of the Children’s Institute, is achieved by taking: “food from the mouths of children.”
Further, Dr Chantell Witten states that government needs to address its macro food policy. She says that in South Africa, retailers are making profits against the hunger curve. The Grow Great zero-stunting campaign has identified 10 nutritious foods for child development. To dramatically minimise stunting, it is campaigning to make these 10 foods (which include eggs, peanut butter, full cream milk, dried beans, tinned fish and bread) 20% cheaper by asking retailers to waive their markups and government to subsidise these products.
Moreover, government must take its constitutional duty to provide food for learners through the National School Nutritional Programme (NSNP) seriously. Global studies show how school feeding programmes can improve school attendance, and children’s ability to learn. The NSNP supplements the nutrition of half of all children in South Africa.
Following the closure and partial reinstatement of the NSNP during lockdown, the high court confirmed that the right to basic education and the child’s right to basic nutrition is an unqualified right, and asked for “the justice of eating”. It ordered the Department of Education to reinstitute the programme for all 9.6 million children regardless of if they’d returned to school.
Yet, in April and May 2023, more than a million children in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape went hungry after a change to the procurement system in KZN and failure to pay subsidies timeously in the EC.
Heart-breaking headlines reported children crying from hunger, schools closing early because children could not learn, and children begging for food on the streets. According to Section 27, these failures “pointed to broader problems with the funding and administration of the NSNP.”
Advocacy groups note that the executive and Parliament’s response holding the respective provincial departments of education accountable was heartening, but this was another graphic example of government indifference, resulting in what the high court judge called, “the obscenity of hunger”.
While the NSNP is a priority, food for children in early childhood development is not. The government subsidy to registered ECDs to prepare food for children is a paltry R6.80 per child per day. More troubling, only 33% of ECDs, 627,000 children, receive government subsidies, so most under-fives (the age when stunting occurs) don’t receive government subsidies for food. Both the registration requirements and quantum of the subsidy need urgent attention.
Another strategic intervention against stunting is to extend the CSG to pregnant women to ensure adequate nutrition during pregnancy. A 2021 Embrace, Grow Great, and Stellenbosch University study found that pregnant women in the poorest communities were going hungry, experiencing poor mental health and economic insecurity, which was negatively affecting their children’s development and extending intergenerational cycles of poverty.
The study showed that extending grants to pregnant women would increase the grant budget by a mere 1.5% and have a significant impact on infant health and development.
3 Focus on prevention of violence and child homicide
Extending the CSG to pregnant mothers is also critical to minimise the number of mothers abandoning their babies for financial reasons.
In addition, government needs to be held accountable for its unwillingness to legalise the safe relinquishment of babies through baby savers. Unsafe infant abandonment, often the only option in the absence of safe relinquishment, leads to psychological and physical scarring, ongoing trauma, and frequently results in death.
In 2021, civil society attempted to introduce amendments to the Children’s Act to legalise safe relinquishment, but was opposed by the DSD who considered the life-saving amendments “unconstitutional”. As government stonewalls, more children die.
Moreover, studies have shown that while government is pouring money into policing and the criminal justice system, less than 1% of the DSD’s annual budget is spent on violence prevention or early intervention despite evidence that preventing children from witnessing and experiencing violence stops the cycle of deprivation and disadvantage.
A redirection of funds to violence prevention and family strengthening initiatives is critical for children’s protection.
4 Facilitate safe family care
In 2020, South Africa had 2.9 million orphans and by December 2022, a further 168,200 had lost their primary caregiver to Covid. While many orphans are in safe family care, they are, by definition, at greater risk of poverty, abuse, and exploitation.
Yet, adoption rates declined to a paltry 849 in 2020/2021, a 65% drop in the last 10 years, the foster care system has been broken for more than a decade, and without sufficient alternative family care, plans to deinstitutionalise children present a real danger.
Further, while the department prioritises family care for children, it’s less willing to fund parenting programmes and other resources necessary to make those families a safe space. This, despite children emphasising the need for their parents to get skills and psychosocial support to parent them more effectively.
5 Consistently and adequately resource the helpers
Violence prevention for children requires the active and engaged presence of social workers in communities. But although the National Development Plan calls for 55,000 social workers by 2030, in March 2023, Minister Zulu reported that there were only 22,000 social workers employed in public service (across all sectors). The department aims to grow the number to 31,744 by 2030 at an estimated cost of R9-billion. It’s positive, but even if achieved, that’s still 23,256 social workers too few.
The situation for NGOs is even more desperate. In a Western Cape Child Protection Alliance press statement released for Child Protection Week 2023, 70% of the child protection services in the province claim that although NGOs in the Western Cape provide 55% of child protection services, their subsidies have remained stagnant for the last five years, despite inflation. The upshot is that funding has diminished by 20-25% during the period.
In Gauteng, analysis done by activist Lisa Vetten revealed that its 2023 budget contained a massive 31.4% drop in funding to social welfare services including a 21.1% budget cut to programmes working with families, and a 4.6% drop in funding to community care programmes. Child protection organisations were obligated to provide the same services to the same numbers of children with as much as a 60% cut in salaries.
The Gauteng premier walked back the changes following a national public outcry, but the drastic cuts are not unprecedented and NGOs hit the headlines complaining of late or non-payment of subsidies resulting in increasing risk of NGO closures at the beginning of every financial year.
Such closures are disastrous given government’s lack of resources and its cost structures, on average two to three times higher than those of non-profits. The effect would be increasing non-delivery of services to children, incomprehensible if child protection is indeed a priority.
6 Recognise the role of education in child protection
No one questions the role of education in lifting children out of poverty with its concomitant risks of exposure to violence and adverse childhood experiences. In addition, keeping children in school should be a critical priority since, “without the protection afforded by educational systems, including access to school feeding programmes, millions of children, particularly girls, are at higher risk of violence, exploitation, neglect, malnutrition and online abuse”.
Drop-out rates are therefore concerning. While the department lauded the 65% of learners who completed a matric or TVET national certificate in 2022, MPs paint a different picture. In Gauteng alone, 260,000 learners did not return to school in 2022. Parliamentarians believe that for children to stay in school, government needs to “build more schools, improve teaching and learning to a better quality, give schools and educators the best tools to make a success of our children’s future.” And, we could add, fix broken infrastructure in the existing schools.
But, although government allocated R22-billion to basic education in the most recent budget, statistics show that in real terms the percentage of GDP allocated to education has dropped from 20.5% of GDP in 2001 to 18.42% in 2023.
7 Elevate the voices of children
During Child Protection Week media briefings, the minister emphasised the importance of hearing children’s voices, which the department does primarily through the Nelson Mandela Children’s Parliament. While it’s progress for government to get feedback from children, there’s no process to ensure that input from the children’s parliament affects government policy or practices.
Nor is the children’s parliament representative. Conspicuous by their absence are the voices of the stunted children forced to drop out of school because they don’t have the cognitive ability to cope with the rigours of learning, and those whose caregivers can only afford to feed them one meal a day because the grant doesn’t stretch to the end of the month.
Nor do we hear from the children who left school to beg for food when the NSNP meals didn’t arrive, or those who go hungry every second day because their province’s NSNP meals are so small and insufficient that “stokvelling” them with a friend and only eating twice a week seems better than eating too little every day.
Absent are the stories of the physically or sexually abused or abandoned children who don’t always live to tell them.
Like the four-year-old toddler from Durban whose mother tied her hands with tape and then drowned her in a bucket full of water because she was “difficult and troubling her”, or the seven- and nine-year-old girls from Port Shepstone who were raped by their 19-year-old brother and step-father; the girls whose mother hit them and then bathed them repeatedly to remove the evidence after they told her about the abuse.
We’re lacking the voice of the Grade 10 pupil whose teacher asked her and other learners for sex to improve their marks, and the children, aged six and 14 who were murdered and left in a burning house by their mother’s ex-boyfriend.
And poignantly, we cannot hear the voice of a tiny newborn whose mother abandoned him in a pit latrine in an informal settlement in Pietermaritzburg shortly after his birth. His rescue by members of the community was heralded as a miracle, but he died in hospital the following day.
Responding to his death, a representative of the DSD inadvertently identified the root problem when he said that “the incident is extremely troubling, especially now during Child Protection Month. What is strange is some people in our communities are aware of what the department is capable of doing.” He then went on to tell women to take their unwanted children to “social workers, police stations and clinics so they can get assistance.”
It was said without irony, despite the department’s fierce opposition to safe relinquishment laws that would allow desperate women to relinquish their unwanted children without the consequence of being turned away or risking arrest, and despite the department reputedly often doing very little to help.
At the heart of the issue is that while it is “in our hands to stop the cycle of neglect, abuse, violence and exploitation of children”, government cannot be outraged when a tragedy occurs during Child Protection Week when it failed to acknowledge or use careful strategy, planning and resourcing to eliminate the root cause in the remainder of the year.
Nor, if it was honest, should the DSD’s messaging champion the Constitution or the rights of the child. While it is true that “children in South Africa live in a society with a Constitution that has the highest regard for their rights and for the equality and dignity of everyone” and that “protecting children from violence, exploitation and abuse is not only a basic value, but also an obligation clearly set out in Article 28 of the South African Constitution,” there is no dignity in children starving to death, or drowning in a pit latrine unacknowledged and unaided by the authorities whose job is to protect them.
Without effective support at the highest level, Child Protection Week is analogous to sweeping leaves in a cyclone.
Unquestionably it’s time to pack away the pins and campaign promises and instead build children’s rights into the country’s strategic plans, budgets and structures, and resource it accordingly. Only then should we really claim to be upholding children’s rights to protection from violence, their right to dignity, and claim that we are acting in their best interests. DM
First published in the Daily Maverick: 06.06.2023
To cite please use the author’s name, the year of publication, the title of the article, name of publication, date of publication.
by Robyn Wolfson Vorster | Feb 26, 2023 | Abandonment
It’s been four years since Namibia legalised ‘safe relinquishment’. This followed government, civil society and the ruling party’s youth and women’s leagues declaring child abandonment a national crisis when 13 babies were found dead every month. By contrast, despite South Africa’s exponentially bigger problem, its government opposes legislation to end unsafe abandonment. It begs the question, do South African authorities really believe that every child has a constitutional right to life, or are the lives of Namibian babies more important than ours?
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Namibia began 2023 with a campaign to inform women of their right to safely relinquish a child that they cannot care for.
South Africa started 2023 the same way it ended 2022, with soaring numbers of abandonments, media reports indicating that for every child that survives abandonment, at least one, but as many as two, die, abandoning mothers being arrested despite being failed by authorities when they attempt to put their children into the child protection system, and no approved plan to minimise or mitigate the impact of unsafe abandonment.
By contrast, the Namibian campaign is a follow-up to its government declaring child abandonment a national crisis and a resultant 2019 change to legislation allowing for the safe relinquishment of a child that parents chose not to raise.
Safe relinquishment is defined as the safe, usually anonymous, surrender or placement of a child into a baby saver, or with a designated safe haven provider. Certain criteria must be met for the child to be safely relinquished, including that the child be below a certain age, and free from abuse, neglect or malnutrition.
The number of babies that were being abandoned prior to Namibia’s legislative change is unknown. But, in her 2021 article in the African Human Rights Law Journal on curbing unsafe baby abandonment, Dr Whitney Rosenberg, whose doctoral thesis is on global practices for the safe relinquishment of babies, described how in 2008 staff at the water works in Namibia’s capital Windhoek reported 13 babies were dumped or flushed down toilets every month.
Although Namibian abandonment statistics were hard to access, Rosenberg highlighted widespread concern expressed across the Namibian government and the ruling party about the prevalence and impact of child abandonment.
The need for intervention was voiced by the departments of Home Affairs, whose minister stressed children’s right to life as protected in article 6 of the Namibian constitution; Health, whose deputy minister emphasised the need to train health care workers to deal more sensitively with pregnant teens; and Gender Equality and Child Welfare, whose minister articulated the need to provide support and services for desperate pregnant women. Parliament, Women’s Action for Development (WAD), the SWAPO Party Women’s Council and the SWAPO Party Youth League all called for increased government action to combat unsafe abandonment.
Combined government and civil society pressure led to the 2019 promulgation of the country’s Child Care and Protection Act which included a clause prohibiting the prosecution of women who relinquish their babies safely at a prescribed location (such as a police station, hospital or place of safety), and whose baby shows no signs of harm.
Significantly, this law, which decriminalises the safe relinquishment of babies, was Namibia’s first departure from child-focused legislation that it inherited from South Africa, and was also driven by a need to decolonise its legislation and create child-related laws that are relevant in Africa.
Despite the change in law, the BBC reported that 140 babies were still abandoned unsafely across Namibia between 2018 and 2022. This prompted its government to initiate the 2023 awareness campaign encouraging women to make use of baby savers or relinquish their babies safely with authorities.
SA’s different approach
Although Namibia and South Africa are neighbours, South Africa’s approach to abandonment could not be more different.
During the 2021 and 2022 hearings for the Children’s Amendment Bill, South African civil society painted a bleak picture of unsafe abandonment in the country, and petitioned Parliament to include clauses into the Bill to allow safe relinquishment.
Its submissions included detailed changes to the wording of the Children’s Act and consequential amendments which would legalise the use of baby savers provided the baby was under one and showed no signs of abuse or neglect.
In the Gauteng hearings on the bill, the chairperson of the portfolio committee for social development who, along with many of her colleagues, was visibly moved by the stories of abandoned children who died or were maimed through unsafe abandonment, asked activists “to stop telling these sad stories, they are touching, I’m telling you”.
She and the committee then invited Dr Rosenberg to present on proposed safe relinquishment legislation in March 2022.
Within months, however, the committee had decided to reject most of the clauses in the Bill to focus exclusively on foster care. All discussions about safe relinquishment were also shelved, and despite commitments that the remainder of the clauses would become a committee bill, nine months later and the bill is yet to reappear on the committee’s agenda.
Even if Parliament does reopen discussions about ending unsafe abandonment, it probably won’t get any support from government.
Unlike Namibia, neither the executive, nor the ANC woman’s or youth leagues have made statements about the crisis of child abandonment or the need to save lives. Nor has it ever been on an agenda during Child Protection Week or the 16 Days of Activism for no violence against women and children.
Baby murder rate
This is despite South Africa reportedly having among the highest rates of neonaticide (murder of children within the first 28 days of life: 19.6 per 100,000 live births) and infanticide (murder of babies under one: 28.4 per every 100,000 live births).
The same Medical Research Council study found that children under 5 in South Africa were most likely to die of unnatural causes during the first six days of life as a result of unsafe abandonment.
Nevertheless, the Department of Social Development responded to questions posed by the committee in March 2022 about ending unsafe abandonment by stating that legalising life-saving interventions would be unconstitutional:
“The Children’s Amendment Bill did not make provision for safe abandonment of children nor does it seek to decriminalise safe abandonment. The matter arose as part of the public hearings. If it has to be considered; such consideration will be unconstitutional as it will be in contravention of Section 28 of the Constitution. According to the Constitution of the Republic; children must be protected from maltreatment, neglect, abuse and degradation which are also reiterated in the definition of care in the Principal Act (Children’s Act 38/2005) where a child must be protected from maltreatment, abuse, neglect, degradation, exploitation and any other physical, emotional or moral harm and hazards. Therefore decriminalisation of abandonment will continue to put children’s lives [at risk].”
In her presentation to the committee, Rosenberg countered this argument emphasising (as the Namibian government did) that the child’s constitutional right to life and dignity should trump all other rights, and further, per Section 28(2) of the constitution, that the best interests of the child are paramount in all decisions regarding the child.
She also refuted the department’s claim that legalising safe relinquishment amounts to legalising abandonment. Unsafe abandonment, which epitomises the maltreatment, neglect, abuse and degradation that the department wants to prevent, would remain a criminal offence. If however the mother could not raise the child and was not able to place it into the child protection system, her act of safely relinquishing the child into an accredited baby saver would no longer be a crime.
Legalising safe relinquishment is thus designed, wherever possible, to stop unsafe abandonment which could result in disfigurement and psychological harm, or death.
Prevention
Where Rosenberg and the DSD do agree is about the need to prevent abandonment.
According to the department, its position is to strengthen prevention and early intervention programmes to identify and support pregnant mothers and inform them of “alternatives to abandonment such as termination of pregnancy, giving a child up for adoption or placing a child in alternative care (foster care or child and youth care centres). Early identification of mother at risk upon delivery of the baby must be done and such mothers assessed for appropriate referrals and immediate counselling upon giving birth to avoid abandonment of babies. Communities at large must also be educated about dangers of abandonment and support required by mothers of newborn babies.”
Whilst concurring that prevention is critical to saving lives, activists contend that while the circumstances driving abandonment exist, such as poverty, unemployment, gender-based violence, patriarchy, rampant teen pregnancies, and the restrictive legislation that prevents under 18s and foreigners from placing their children into the child protection system, abandonment will never be eliminated.
They further argue that, across all levels, government has proved very poor at the early identification of at-risk women, providing counselling and support, and assisting mothers to exercise options other than raising their child. And, they argue, the situation has become worse over the last year since the department made this policy statement.
Case studies
The failure is painfully illustrated by the stories of four mothers from four provinces, all experiencing a crisis pregnancy and trying to seek help.
In October 2022, a 23-year-old mother from Veralum, KwaZulu Natal abandoned her three-month-old baby girl next to a stream. Her baby was clothed, and she was left with a nappy bag containing nappies, a dummy and a bottle of milk, along with a note explain why her mother abandoned her:
“Hi, You might be wondering why I dumped my baby, don’t wonder, just help her if you can or call authorities but don’t judge me. I have spoken twice with social workers they delaying to assist. I know this looks bad but I had no option. The system is fragile and we can’t even abort safely anymore. Hospitals have strict rules.” (sic)
Despite the child being in good health when found, her mother was arrested for child abandonment after she handed herself in to police following a furore that erupted on social media. She was charged and released on R500 bail.
In response, the KwaZulu-Natal MEC of social development Nonhlanhla Khoza, who cited the Veralum child’s story with two others in which babies narrowly survived unsafe abandonment: one where a newborn baby boy was left to drown in a pit latrine in northern KwaZulu-Natal, and another, in Newcastle, where a child was thrown out of a hospital window, said that it “was devastating to see such despicable incidents of dumping of children”.
The MEC then insisted that mothers have “a lot of options” when facing a crisis pregnancy: “We encourage parents who are unable to care for their children to seek help at a clinic, hospital or the department. We have a lot of options made available by our government to ensure that we safeguard the children and we want to urge parents not to resort to dumping children regardless of situations they face.”
She painstakingly detailed the process that authorities follow. A clinic refers a mom to a social worker, options counselling occurs, a safety and risk assessment is conducted for the child, followed by the child’s removal to temporary safe care in a family or child and youth care centre. Finally, a care plan for reunification is developed. Urging mothers to approach the department if they are in crisis, she threatened that abandoning mothers would “face the might of the law”.
It sounds constructive, except that the MEC was patently ignoring the mother’s protest that the system doesn’t work. It’s a depressingly common narrative.
In the Western Cape, Amanda Jones, a volunteer from the Helderberg, Baby Saver, had to threaten the Department Of Social Development with charges of culpable homicide if they did not allocate a social worker to a mother experiencing a crisis pregnancy who was at high risk of abandoning her baby.
Aphiwe* was adamant she did not want her baby. She told Jones that she was revolted by the child moving in her womb. She had tried to abort her baby three times over the course of the pregnancy, the final time at 37 weeks when she again failed, but her attempt resulted in an infection. Yet. at 39 weeks, regardless of the danger, she was still talking about trying to abort her child a fourth time.
The baby’s father told her he didn’t care what happened to the baby, and it was her problem. He threatened to block her if she kept contacting him.
When Aphiwe eventually went to the local clinic in her third trimester, she described being “chased away” by the nursing sister who told her that they didn’t have time for people like her who didn’t know what they wanted, and came so late in the pregnancy to get care. Aphiwe then sought help from a local GP who diagnosed a serious infection from the failed late-term abortion. He gave her medication, but although he said that the infection could be life threatening for the baby, did not book her into hospital.
After weeks of trying to get help for Aphiwe and her baby, it took Jones’s email begging the department to intervene and threatening to press charges if anything happened to Aphiwe’s baby, for it to get a child welfare social worker allocated to her case to help her book into hospital and place her baby into the child protection system.
Jones specifically requested that Aphiwe’s file contain a note stating that the hospital should not give the baby to her mother post-birth because she was at high risk for harming the child.
Despite this, in Aphiwe’s words, the child welfare social worker assigned to her case told her that, “I should not give the baby up for adoption because it’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life… If I do, I will never have peace and nothing will ever go according [to plan] with my life.”
The social worker then told her she may be bewitched and should visit her church for help.
Further, despite Aphiwe’s hospital admittance form stating the baby was to be adopted and the clear message given to the social worker that she may hurt her child, Aphiwe’s baby girl was handed to her after she was born. Aphiwe was placed on a chair outside the delivery room and instructed to breastfeed her child before they would allocate her a bed for her post-birth recovery.
Had she been discharged with her daughter, Aphiwe’s baby may have become another heartbreaking abandonment statistic or story. Mercifully though, Jones, dismayed at the child welfare social worker’s approach to the case, obtained help from another child protection organisation that removed the child. Aphiwe’s baby is now in the loving care of a temporary safe care parent.
The outcome could have been very different. In another troublingly similar story, a mother in Gauteng who also did not want her child was forced to breastfeed and care for her newborn in hospital for three days while the hospital blocked efforts from the temporary safe care parent to collect him. This was despite the mother also being deemed high risk for abandonment.
The safety parent’s relief at finally being handed the baby boy was short-lived. A medical checkup shortly after Thando* was placed in her care showed that the baby had a fractured skull.
The hospital’s insistence that his mother parent him almost cost Thando his life.
Shortly after the Veralum mom’s arrest for child abandonment, another safety parent, this time in the Eastern Cape, sat in a car with a young mother who had just confessed to abandoning her newborn daughter. The story of a baby girl left behind a fast-food restaurant at night had made it into the media in their hometown and Lorraine* had read it with dismay. She knew immediately that she had spoken to the abandoning mommy a week before.
During their discussion, Nkululeko* had told Lorraine that she had hidden her pregnancy and didn’t want anyone to know about the new baby. She was adamant that she would neither identify the birth father nor raise the child.
Lorraine is not a statutory social worker and cannot take a child into the child protection system. She therefore referred the mom to the local DSD, warning them that Nkululeko was terrified of anyone finding out about the pregnancy and that they should not ask questions until they had her baby in temporary safe care. Heedless, the DSD social workers pushed for details about Nkululeko, her family and the birth father. They then told Lorraine that she had disappeared and would no longer answer their calls.
The day after the referral, news broke that a baby girl had been abandoned the night before.
Although Nkululeko’s baby survived, Lorraine was appalled. Not only had Nkululeko felt she had no option but to abandon her baby after getting assistance from the DSD, but Lorraine knew she had to counsel her to turn herself in to police.
Nkululeko was arrested and charged with abandonment.
There is a small glimmer of hope in this story. At court, Nkululeko was released on her own recognisance, and after counselling, was reunited with her daughter who she has chosen to raise.
But she still faces criminal charges. She is back in court this month to see what the penalty will be for her crime.
All four stories have a common link, the singular lack of assistance for women experiencing a crisis pregnancy from hospitals, government social workers and the DSD. Without the intervention of volunteers and temporary safety parents, these babies could have died or been permanently estranged from their birth families.
The stories belie the MEC’s promise that birth mothers have a lot of options. Conversely, they show that government interventions often drive mothers to abandonment rather than preventing it.
And despite the promises and her threats, unsafe abandonment continues unabated, especially in KwaZulu Natal.
In January 2023, another baby was abandoned about 15km from where the Veralum baby was found in Phoenix, this time on the side of a highway, wrapped in a plastic bag. Babies were also found on an electrical box in Margate, outside a house, also in Margate, in a construction site in Port Shepstone, and at a clinic in Durban.
Nadene Grabham from Baby Savers SA says that in January and the first two days of February alone, there were 10 media reports of babies abandoned unsafely. Half of the babies were found dead: in stormwater drains, on dumping sites and on the street wrapped in plastic bags.
Although all forms of abandonment, including safe relinquishment, are still illegal in South Africa, Grabham says that 12 babies have been safely relinquished into baby savers so far this year. All survived and were immediately placed into the child protection system.
It’s hard to argue that there is no crisis. It is even harder to argue that government interventions are sufficient to end unsafe abandonment. It’s hardest to argue that it would be unconstitutional to pass legislation that saves the lives of unwanted babies and prevents the physical and psychological trauma of unsafe abandonment.
Bottom line is that safe relinquishment saves lives. But perhaps, as statistics and anecdotal evidence show, in South Africa, unlike Namibia, these little lives just aren’t that valuable.
*Names changed to protect their identities.
This article was first published in the Daily Maverick: 26.02.2023
To cite please use the author’s name, the year of publication, the title of the article, name of publication (Daily Maverick), date of publication.
by Robyn Wolfson Vorster | Jan 10, 2023 | Abandonment
BBC Africa
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by Robyn Wolfson Vorster | Aug 23, 2022 | Abandonment, Child Homicide
Catholic Bishops Liaison Office
Watch on Youtube
High levels of crisis pregnancies in South Africa and limited options lead large numbers of desperate
girls and women to abandon their babies in unsafe circumstances, or seek out late-term abortions. This
can result in death or injury to the child and the mother. The availability of ‘baby savers’ as a safe
relinquishment option would do much to prevent these deaths. Yet all forms of child abandonment,
including safe relinquishment, remain a criminal offence in South Africa.
Speakers: Ms Robyn Wolfson Vorster, Child protection activist and writer: “For the Voiceless”
and Dr Whitney Rosenberg, Senior Lecturer, Law of Persons and Family, UJ
