by Robyn Wolfson Vorster | Nov 10, 2023 | Child Abuse
About two in five boys in South Africa are sexually abused before the age of 18. Of those boys, 20% are abused by teachers. Those reporting traumatic childhood experiences such as sexual and physical abuse are 2-5 times more likely to attempt suicide, with early onset of trauma an even stronger predictor. Given those statistics, we should not be asking why Julio Mordoh died, but rather how his abuse occurred at the elite boys’ school tasked with safeguarding him.
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On 5 November 2022, Teresa Mordoh received a phone call that’s every parent’s worst nightmare. She was told that her son, Julio, had attempted suicide.
She and her family were en route to see him, bringing a cake to celebrate his father Marcio’s birthday, when the heart-stopping call came.
During the frantic trip across town, Teresa tried to cling to hope – it wasn’t the first time Julio had tried to take his life.
Desperate for news, she called again, only to be told that paramedics were unable to resuscitate him and that Julio had been pronounced dead.
In a Facebook post paying tribute to her son, Teresa described how she wished they could have “flown over the traffic on Saturday to get there just a few mins earlier to save you and tell you again how much we love you”.
She explained how, when they finally arrived, her son’s body was lying lifeless on the floor. He was still warm when she hugged and kissed him goodbye.
While they couldn’t intervene on the day Julio’s life ended, the family had done everything possible to support and save him.
When Julio Mordoh died just two months before his 21st birthday, he had been assessed by six psychiatrists, treated by eight psychologists, spent over 12 months in treatment as an inpatient, and been hospitalised 12 times for mental health-related conditions, including complex post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidality.
On the day he hanged himself with his belt, he was in a secure, private psychiatric facility where he’d been admitted as a high-risk patient to keep him from self-harming.
Teresa remembers little of the terrible moments following her son’s death, but she does recall every decision that brought them to that day.
Describing Julio as a calm and loving baby with huge brown eyes, she says that while he was diminutive in stature, like his parents, it was obvious from the time that he was in pre-school how talented and clever he was. He competed in gymnastics at the highest level from a very young age.
A deep thinker, he was obsessed with finding out how things worked, and designing and inventing everything from water rockets to a go-kart, and then building them with his dad.
It was his intelligence that made the family choose to send him to the best school they could afford. With its excellent academic record, St John’s College in Houghton, Johannesburg, seemed the best fit. They even bought a house within a stone’s throw of the school.
As Teresa and I sat drinking tea on her veranda, surveying the family’s wild and beautiful garden complete with tree houses and homemade forts, we could hear the St John’s school bell chiming 10.
Although we can’t see the clock tower Julio allegedly climbed while in prep school, for the Mordoh family, the melodic chiming is a haunting hourly reminder of the suffering he endured.
St John’s formed a significant part of Julio’s life. He was there for pre-prep and prep school, and then, after the family spent his high school years in France and Dubai, he chose to return home to complete his A-levels at the school.
His experiences in pre-prep and 6th Form were positive ones, but Teresa says that he felt very differently about the prep school. She describes how in the year that he died they visited the school together, which gave Julio the opportunity to show his mother some of his favourite places, including the science lab and 6th Form lounge.
She says she was struck, however, by how his demeanour and body language changed and how he withdrew into himself when he walked into the prep school.
By then, she knew why.
***
According to Teresa, the catalyst for a major change in Julio’s life was St John’s requirement for all boys to participate in school sporting activities.
By the time Julio was in prep school, he was already competing in gymnastics (a sport not offered by the school) at national and then international level. In his second year at prep school, he received a special dispensation excusing him from school sports and even school recognition for his achievements.
But his exclusion left him isolated from his peers. That, along with his size and intellect, made him a target for bullying.
After a bullying incident that Julio downplayed because he didn’t want to be a snitch or singled out, his headmaster suggested that Julio have weekly hour-long counselling sessions with the prep’s head of pastoral care.
According to Teresa, the head of pastoral care was a friendly, caring and approachable man. He seemed to take a keen interest in Julio and his well-being and kept in WhatsApp contact with her about Julio’s progress and emotional stability.
In addition to counselling sessions, the head of pastoral care, who was also in charge of rock climbing at St John’s, presented climbing as a solution to both Julio’s isolation and the ongoing bullying.
Julio’s upper body strength and agility made him a perfect candidate for climbing, at the time an emerging sport at the school. Although boys were not allowed to climb until they were 12 years old, the teacher offered him the opportunity to start training in 2013 when he was only 11.
Unbeknownst to the family, he invited Julio to go bouldering in the school “cave” during break. Julio disclosed to a friend that the teacher warned him not to tell anyone, especially his parents, in case they got angry and he wasn’t allowed to climb anymore.
His teacher also permitted him to climb the school climbing wall which was supposed to be off limits until he was in Grade 6. It was another secret, along with his reported climbing of the school’s bell tower.
By the end of that year, Julio’s mother had seen a notable change in his behaviour. He was more withdrawn, sad, private and less willing to connect with his dad or open up to her.
She attributed it to his age, but sought help from the headmaster when Julio began to resist going to school and stopped sleeping well. Teresa says he seemed visibly afraid of school and refused to attend sessions with the school’s male psychologist.
Once again, the school’s proposed solution was counselling with its head of pastoral care.
Despite his distress, Julio continued to excel academically and in gymnastics, and in August 2014, he won the U13 SA National Rock Climbing Championship.
Teresa remembers Julio’s climbing teacher encouraging him to go on weekend trips with the school’s explorers to get climbing experience. But despite his persistence, Teresa wouldn’t let Julio camp unsupervised overnight, citing his weekend gymnastics commitments as an excuse.
However, in November 2014, a few months after his nationals win, she did allow him to go on a day trip to the Magaliesberg with his climbing teacher and some other boys.
Teresa describes her dismay when it got dark and her son had still not returned. When he finally got home at 7pm, he was the only boy in the car.
As Marcio invited the teacher in for coffee, Julio rushed off to shower. But before leaving, the head of pastoral care insisted on giving Julio his engraved Leatherman as a “reminder of the special day”. Julio reluctantly accepted the gift but then hid it away. His mother says he never used it.
It wasn’t long after that the head of pastoral care and climbing teacher, whose name is inscribed on the Leatherman he gave Julio, left the college to take up a deputy head position at another school.
Shortly thereafter, on the cusp of qualifying for the 2015 World Championships, Julio stopped climbing.
***
What happened during Julio’s time in the prep school stayed buried through his teenage years when the Mordohs lived in France and then Dubai, until five years later when the family returned to South Africa.
While Julio was excited to be home and seemingly enjoyed 6th Form at St John’s, his anxiety intensified and his insomnia worsened.
His mother describes how he would come home from school with goosebumps and visibly shaky. After suffering more extreme anxiety and panic attacks, his psychologist diagnosed him with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
When the psychologist briefed the family, one of the first questions she asked was if Julio had been sexually abused.
It was a question no one could answer. Despite the diagnosis and help from his psychologist, Julio wasn’t able to access what had caused the trauma, so after completing 6th Form in 2020, he chose to spend his gap year seeking help.
During his long-term treatment, Julio wrote this: “There are one or two things that I haven’t shared with anyone yet… I’ve pushed this to the deepest, darkest corner of my mind and tried hard to delete it from my memory entirely. Saying it out loud makes it real and validates that it actually happened.”
Writing from Julio Mordoh’s diary. (Photo: Supplied)
The diary entry was written shortly before 15 November 2021, when St John’s released a letter notifying the school community that several past pupils had alleged sexual assault by a former teacher who had been employed in the prep school between 2002 and 2014, and that charges had been laid with the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences unit and the matter reported to the South African Council of Educators and the Anglican Safe Church Unit.
Teresa remembers how, when Julio’s psychologist read him the letter, his head dropped and his body stiffened. When she had finished reading, all he could say was: “Oh, so there were other boys. I thought I was the only one.”
On hearing his words, Teresa says she felt as if her heart shattered into a million pieces, realising her son had suffered the shame of thinking he was the only victim and therefore somehow to blame.
Julio’s psychologist, who believed that Julio would have benefited from group therapy to deal with those feelings of shame and isolation in a safe space with other survivors, offered to facilitate group therapy for the victims.
But the school declined, confirming that it was providing the victims with psychological support if required, but that everyone was “on a different journey” and cited victims’ requests for privacy.
In a written response to questions for this article, the school’s executive headmaster, Stuart West, stressed that “the need for such a process was not shared by other victims and could not be imposed on them.”
Perhaps for this reason, Julio never disclosed the details of his abuse. However, a close friend said he told her that it went on for a long time and that he felt confused, tormented and irreparably damaged.
He said that “he felt broken and wished his life was over. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to fix himself”.
It was the message that he conveyed to St John’s when he was finally ready to meet with the school in July 2022, three months after allowing his psychologist to disclose to the school that he was also a victim.
In September 2022, two months after he met with the head of human resources at St John’s, the family received a letter from the headmaster expressing alarm over Julio’s suicidality and stating that “without any admission of liability” the school would “sponsor a short-term hospitalisation at an approved mental health facility that specialises in patients that are at risk.”
En route to being admitted, Julio went to a police station where he wrote an affidavit stating that he had been sexually abused by his climbing coach (who he names) while a pupil at St John’s College during the years of 2011 to the end of 2014 when he was aged 10 to 12 years old.
It was his final act of defiance against the abuse that forever altered his life.
***
Shortly thereafter, while in the supposedly secure facility, after begging unsuccessfully to be sedated following intense dreams, flashbacks and extreme agitation, Julio hanged himself.
Although 10 survivors of the abuse at St John’s prep school came forward, the case against Julio’s alleged abuser, which was moved to Rustenburg in November 2021, stalled because there was no active investigation.
Attorney Ian Levitt subsequently became involved, resulting in the case being incorporated into Operation Nemo and Colonel Heila Niemand being appointed as the special investigating officer.
On 9 October 2023, the former head of pastoral care at St John’s prep, who cannot be named until he has pleaded to the charges, finally appeared in court.
The case was postponed to 7 December.
Headmaster West emphasised the importance of duty of care and said the school continues to support the complainants in the case. He also referenced a report by retired Constitutional Court judge Johan Froneman commissioned by the school after the allegations of abuse emerged. It was deemed too confidential for release even in a redacted form, but a summary was sent to the school community.
The report noted that the school had no knowledge of the allegations of abuse prior to 2021. It also noted that during the prep teacher’s tenure, no complaints were made against him by pupils.
The summarised report provides little explanation of how the former head of pastoral care was able to abuse boys undetected throughout his 12-year employment at St John’s, but does note that “two complaints were taken by Prep staff to their Head during the former teacher’s tenure, and these were appropriately dealt with by the Prep Head at the time.”
While the nature of those complaints is not detailed, the report stresses that Froneman “did not uncover improper management of the complaints… given the knowledge available at the time regarding sexual and other abuse”.
Tragically, Julio is one of many pupils who are sexually or physically abused at one of South Africa’s elite boy’s schools.
The second of this two-part series tells the stories of two other boys whose lives ended tragically following abuse at two other schools, and unpacks South Africa’s horror statistics about the sexual abuse of boys and the link between abuse and suicide. DM
If a child you know has been affected by sexual abuse or is at risk for suicide, please contact Childline’s Helpline 24X7 on 116 (free from all networks) or visit their Online Counselling chatrooms.
These articles were written in loving memory of:
Julio Mordoh: 08.01.2002–05.11.2022
Thomas Kruger: 20.03.2002–17.11.2018
Bradley Skipper: 18.12.1989–30.12.2017
First published in the Daily Maverick: 2023.10.10
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.
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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
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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 | Dec 21, 2022 | Child and Youth Care Centres
It’s Christmas — a time for parties, presents and pity for those children spending the holidays in institutional care. It makes government’s plan for the mass deinstitutionalisation of children seem miraculous. But, instead, in an uncanny recreation of the first Christmas, it may leave many children out in the cold.
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It’s been three years since, on 18 December 2019, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on the “promotion and protection of the rights of children”.
The resolution has a section dedicated to “children without parental care”. It states that children should grow up in a family environment, and that “every effort should be directed to enabling children to remain in or swiftly return to the care of their parents or, when appropriate, other close family members and that, where alternative care is necessary, family and community-based care should be promoted over placement in institutions”.
This was followed on 25 June 2022 by the Kigali Declaration on care and protection reform — signed by all Commonwealth countries, including South Africa — which “encourage development agencies by 2025 to prioritise quality care arrangements at the community level, over institutionalisation” and “support projects which take a holistic and inclusive approach to child protection systems development and family strengthening”.
While the move towards deinstitutionalisation seeks to uphold the rights of children, it’s also predicated on the belief that all institutions are inherently damaging, unnecessary and even self-serving. It’s a perspective obvious in global thinking about institutional care.
A study which focuses on “dispelling the orphan myth” illustrates that, while there are an estimated eight million children in institutions globally, 80% have a living parent.
Although the study did not include South Africa, it indicated that, across multiple countries, children were placed in institutional care due to poverty, disabilities, abuse or neglect, discrimination (for example, families that did not want to raise a girl) or because organisations were using nefarious means such as removal orders or recruitment to populate their institutions.
Equally, the Kigali Declaration argues that institutional care is being promoted by “well-meaning international aid, donations, orphanage volunteering, mission trips or tourist visits”. These, it says, “can lead to unnecessary family-child separation and undermine care reform efforts”.
For South Africa, the declarations represent an important commitment from government to move away from long-term institutional care for vulnerable children and have received widespread support.
Lack of nuance
As with many child-rights-focused initiatives in the country, though, the lack of nuance in the global view on institutions may be unhelpful in a South African context, and the application and implementation of the approach is proving challenging.
South Africa has no published figures about the number of children in alternative care, but in March 2022, the department of social development (DSD) reported to the parliamentary portfolio committee on social development that the country had 15,552 children in registered child and youth care centres (CYCCs). There were 3,337 children in temporary safe care and 912 in secure facilities for children with behavioural, emotional and psychological difficulties.
These statistics have not been disaggregated, so it’s difficult to tell how many of these children have been placed in CYCCs because of abuse and neglect; how many have living family members, and how many are abandoned or orphaned with no family options for care.
But, if the figures are accurate — which is doubtful because they do not include unregistered institutions — the number of children in institutional care is relatively low given the country’s ongoing challenges with orphaning and abandonment.
According to UCT’s Children Count, in 2020 there were 2.9 million orphans in South Africa. This includes children without a living biological mother, father or both parents, and is equivalent to 14% of all children in South Africa. A total of 531,000 were maternal orphans and 620,000 (3% of all children) were double orphans.
In addition, as of 5 November 2022, 147,000 South African children had lost a primary caregiver due to Covid-19. Of these children, 31% had lost their mother during the pandemic.
In Gauteng, the General Household survey from 2020/2021 recorded 154,000 children between the ages of 0 and 17 being orphaned, a significant increase from the 2019 figure of 78,000, bringing the total number of single or double orphans in the province to 566,000.
While there are no formal statistics to confirm the number of abandoned children in the country, the March report sent to the social development portfolio committee estimated that about 10,500 children had been abandoned across eight of the country’s nine provinces in the past decade (North West did not provide statistics).
The Minister of Social Development admitted that over a thousand children entered the child protection system through abandonment in a two-year period.
Significant numbers need protection
Although not all orphaned or abandoned children need alternative care, the figures indicate that significant numbers of children require care and protection.
This is reinforced by anecdotal evidence. Baby Savers SA reports receiving between 10 and 20 queries every working day from desperate, pregnant moms experiencing a crisis pregnancy, and inquiring about options for placing their children into the child protection system.
Further, despite the DSD stating that CYCCs across the country are 3,000 children under-capacity, in Gauteng, CYCCs testify that they’re turning away between five and 10 children a week.
In this context, preventing babies entering care and shortening the stay of older children in institutional care seems like a Christmas miracle; a response to concerns raised by child protection activists and CYCCs themselves over the past two decades about the length of time children are spending in care.
Factors identified as leading to children’s protracted stays in institutions include high numbers of anonymous abandonments, violence against children, abuse and neglect, anti-adoption sentiment, lack of documentation, interminable bureaucratic processes to obtain birth certificates for children, prolonged attempts to trace first families, lengthy processes to place adoptable children into families, the ongoing collapse of the foster care system and the limited number of social workers able to vet, screen and monitor temporary safe care and foster care parents.
The upshot is that support for women experiencing a crisis pregnancy, violence prevention programmes, increased efficiencies, additional social worker resources and an openness to permanency planning through adoption are an essential part of any plan to end institutional care.
Gauteng prototype
It’s too soon to tell if these components will be included in government’s eventual plan. But despite this, in Gauteng, the DSD has already fast-tracked the phasing out of institutional care for children in accordance with a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed between the Gauteng DSD and Hope and Homes, a global organisation focused on deinstitutionalisation.
Although this MOU was first agreed in 2016, the Kigali Declaration has led to a flurry of activity towards ending the institutional care of children by the Gauteng DSD because the province has been identified as the prototype for the country.
In July 2022, just a month after the declaration was signed, Hope and Homes met with the CYCCs in Gauteng to inform them that all CYCCs would be closed by 2030. CYCCs were told that they can be repurposed in accordance with the established needs of communities derived through community mapping exercises and based on priorities and gaps the provincial DSD has identified in its planning.
Some suggestions made during the meeting about how CYCCs can “pivot”, are for them to become facilities for children aged 3-11 with oppositional defiant behaviours, day care centres, community outlets or step-down facilities for independent living which will be run by the DSD for children aged 11-21.
Only organisations that meet the DSD’s strategic priorities will continue to be funded.
When CYCCs raised concerns about changing the constitution of their NPO, about zoning permissions for their properties, donor requirements, and about managing the costs of running operations while also transforming their care environment for future requirements, they were told that they had the next five to eight years to review their operations model, repurpose existing buildings and change their funding streams, but that they would ultimately find the shift from “running an institution” more “rewarding in terms of children’s best interests”.
Supported by the DSD, Hope and Homes also declared an immediate moratorium on children aged 0-3 being placed in CYCCs, and reported that, as the bank of temporary safe care parents increases, children below the age of three currently in CYCCs could be moved too.
Hope and Homes will provide CYCCs with a tool to determine adoptability of those children currently in care. However, the goal will be to reunify children with families wherever possible.
Under the shadow of Life Esidimeni
No one disputes the dangers of long-term institutional care for children. But there are increasing concerns over the deinstitutionalisation strategy being employed in the province.
These focus on three key issues: Hope and Homes’ appreciation of the local South African child protection context and its complexities; the haphazard roll-out of the plan in the province, and the challenges and potential dangers of decentralised, potentially unsupervised care — especially in a province still living under the shadow of the Life Esidimeni tragedy.
Crucial to the disquiet is the question of why the DSD chose to work with a UK-based organisation to pioneer its plans for deinstitutionalisation, when it had local options available.
Initially, it didn’t. When Hope and Homes signed the MOU in 2016, it was in conjunction with Give a Child a Family Africa (GCF), an organisation based in KwaZulu-Natal that has had success across Africa with deinstitutionalisation and replacing institutional care with effective family-based care for children.
GCF believes that only a small percentage of children require long-term institutional care. However, it also recognises that deinstitutionalisation of children requires a serious commitment and a specific plan of action.
Following the signing of the MOU, it seconded its social worker to Hope and Homes for two years to help them understand the South African child protection challenges and develop a contextually relevant foster care programme.
However, when the contract ended after two years, it became clear that they had a different vision to Hope and Homes, who deemed GCF’s foster care strategy with its intensive vetting, recruiting and training regime, social worker involvement and support groups, too expensive.
Hope and Homes has run the programme without GCF since 2017.
While Hope and Homes has a wealth of experience running deinstitutionalisation strategies across the globe, there’s concern that it may not appreciate the complexity of the South African context.
During the CYCC briefing, Lourenza Foghill, national director of Hope and Homes for Children South Africa, appeared to diminish the challenge of abandoned babies without family care, claiming that Hope and Homes would be able to find the families of many “so-called abandoned babies” because it has experience using track and trace to do so.
She also intimated that the presence of CYCCs was encouraging desperate mothers to place their children into the child protection system rather than raising the child. She said there are currently “lots of people willing to help desperate mothers, which leads to mothers deciding that they can’t and won’t be able to care for their baby, which leads to the baby going to a CYCC and then being adopted”. This, she said, “is not optimal for Hope and Homes”.
In addition, although she recognised the impact of Covid on the recruitment of temporary safety parents, she didn’t acknowledge the current problems with the foster care system which have still not been solved more than a decade after the first court order instructing government to fix the overburdened and under-resourced system.
And despite referring to the availability of temporary safety parents to keep 0-3-year-olds out of institutions, as of July, Hope and Homes only had 18 parents in the “bank”.
Haphazard implementation
Equally concerning is the seemingly haphazard way that the programme is being implemented by the department. No written directives on the deinstitutionalisation process or requirements have been published, and government confessed that, despite instructing the CYCCs in July that they were not allowed to receive any more children aged 0-3, it failed to brief the child protection organisations (CPOs) that place children with them about the change in policy.
CPOs have unwittingly continued to bring 0-3-year-olds to CYCCs, forcing them to either ignore the moratorium or turn children away.
Moreover, it appears that whether intentionally or coincidentally, the DSD is making the re-registration of CYCCs very difficult. The upshot is that it is culling CYCCs even before it is ready to roll out its plan for deinstitutionalisation.
Factors precluding re-registration include DSD requests for health and safety certificates despite these not being required when there are no structural changes; for building plans despite some buildings being more than 100 years old, and for certification of competence for child and youth care workers from the South African Council for Social Service Professions (SACSSP), which are mandatory, but the SACSSP cannot issue certificates because of technical problems and the DSD won’t accept written confirmation of competence.
The result of these bureaucratic challenges is that some CYCCs will lose their registration long before alternative arrangements can be made for the children in their care. They will be forced to turn children in need away and, if the problems persist, children in their care will be removed because magistrates will not renew orders if the CYCC is not registered.
Others will have their children forcibly removed.
Care centre re-registration
In March 2022, a Gauteng CYCC was denied re-registration after the department introduced new requirements that had not been in place when it was originally registered in 2016. Unlike other CYCCs experiencing similar challenges who managed to get short-term re-registration while they raised money for architect fees and developing building plans, obtained health certificates in a pandemic or assisted the SACSSP to verify their staff training, this CYCC was given no grace period.
It was informed that its 10 children, aged three and under, would be removed and placed elsewhere.
In disbelief, caregivers packed everything for their children and watched while they were relocated to temporary safe care in Pretoria. For two months, they transported their care workers to Pretoria every day to maintain continuity of care for their children. Their nursery manager slept in a sleeping bag on the floor at the children’s new home to try to mitigate the trauma of the move.
By May, however, it became clear that they wouldn’t be re-registered and, for the sake of the children, they chose to withdraw.
They now face the dilemma of whether they should continue to employ their nine staff members whose salaries they still pay, despite not having any children in their care.
The story of Hannah
Notwithstanding their best efforts to minimise disruptions to the children, the nursery manager told the story of Hannah* who had been placed in the CYCC’s care at birth. At the age of three, she was moved from the only family she had known. As she arrived at her new “home”, she was greeted by her new house mother who asked her how she was.
The little girl looked at the nursery manager, then tensed up and threw herself face down on the ground. Recognising a trauma-induced “freeze” response, the nursery manager picked Hannah up, comforted her and helped her to deal with her distress.
A month later, Hannah’s best friend and “sister” was adopted and left the home, and a month after that, the nursery manager and her beloved “aunties” had to leave. Hannah, who is not adoptable because she has family with whom she cannot yet be reunited, will spend this Christmas in temporary safe care without the adults or friend who love her, and to whom she attached at birth.
Hannah’s story epitomises the damage that can be done without a proper deinstitutionalisation roll-out plan or way of ensuring continuity of care for all children.
Equally concerning is what has become of the 0-3-year-old children whose stories cannot be told, but who are already being turned away from CYCCs despite there being no alternative plan for their care.
Who’ll step in?
While an end to long-term institutional care is both a global priority that the South African government has endorsed — and an ethical imperative — important questions need to be asked about who will care for these children when institutions are gone.
How will we devolve quality care away from organisations but still ensure that there is proper recruiting, vetting, training and monitoring of their replacement carers?
How will we ensure that a professional foster care and temporary safe care system is not equally destructive, as has been experienced in other parts of the globe?
Although the UN resolution emphasises permanency, how will we provide permanency for vulnerable children in a country with a statistically verifiable problem with anonymous abandonment; more than half a million double orphans; the ongoing challenge of violence, neglect and abuse; an anti-adoption stance; an overburdened foster care system and too few social workers?
As the deinstitutionalisation plan is executed, many CYCCs will be forced to close their doors and dismiss their caregivers. Others will pivot and reinvent themselves in a desperate attempt to continue receiving government subsidies.
It is the children and their best interests that should be of primary concern.
As the spectre of Life Esidimeni continues to loom over Gauteng, the haphazard implementation of decentralised care without proper supervision and support is a terrifying prospect.
With our most vulnerable children at stake, we cannot afford to get this wrong. DM
* Name changed to protect her identity.
Hope and Homes was asked for comment for this article, but had not responded at the time of publishing.
Article first published in the Daily Maverick 21.12.22
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 | Dec 15, 2022 | Child Abuse
The 16 Days of Activism is a palpable reminder of the horrible human cost of violence against children. But as we admit failure in ending violence through policing and the criminal justice system, underfunded prevention programmes are quietly changing communities and saving lives.
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Every 16 Days of Activism, the media is awash with the heartbreaking stories of children whose lives have been changed by violence. According to Police Minister Bheki Cele, 558 children were killed in the six months between April and September 2022. In the three months between July and September, there were 294 attempted murders of children reported and 1,895 grievous bodily harm cases involving children.
Sobering as these stats are, we cannot fully appreciate the impact of violence without insight into the loss in human capital due to experiences of violence during childhood.
The World Bank Human Capital Index (HCI) measures the productivity and human capital potential of each child in the country given optimal health and education conditions. It captures the expected potential of children given the conditions in their country. On this measure, if a child born in South Africa today completed their education and had full health, they would only reach 43% of their potential productivity as an adult.
In 2015, a study by Save the Children South Africa estimated that this loss of human capital equated to roughly R238-billion (about 6% of 2015 GDP), “double what we are currently spending on the criminal justice system annually, and more than 10 times the cost of gender-based violence”.
According to an Institute of Security Studies policy brief in 2017, children who experience neglect and abuse, or witness violence, are at increased risk of negative health and behavioural outcomes, and of perpetrating violence.
Using data from the Birth to Thirty (Bt30) cohort study and the adverse childhood experience framework, researcher Sara Naicker found that violence represents a threat to development throughout the life course. Children exposed to a range of adversity in their homes and communities, including physical, emotional and sexual abuse, chronic unemployment, household substance abuse, community violence, and parent or household death, are likely to experience poor health and well-being as adults, an increase in harmful risky behaviours and reduced human capital.
The study confirmed that early adversity was linked to poorer health, well-being and social outcomes in young adulthood, and that the more adversities a child experienced, the greater their risk of suffering negative physical and mental health and social outcomes including criminality, psychological distress, incomplete schooling, illness, poverty and unemployment.
Disturbingly, 87% of the Birth to Thirty cohort had experienced exposure to at least four adverse childhood experiences by the age of 18.
While all adversities caused harm, the research found a particularly strong link between violence and poor outcomes. Physical abuse in childhood increased the likelihood of a child dropping out of school, being unemployed and experiencing social isolation, while exposure to community violence led to increased substance abuse and psychological distress as adults.
Bt30 data show that “in a single generation, just 28 years, children subjected to high levels of adversity and widespread violence were more likely to drop out of school, be unemployed, engage in crime, have mental health problems, be socially isolated and have poorer health”.
Naicker explains that “at the age of six, young children in the cohort who were exposed to high levels of community danger and intimate partner violence within the home were displaying symptoms of anxiety, depression, aggression and poor emotional adjustment, such as oppositional behaviour, or patterns of deviant and hostile behaviour and impairment of social relationships”. This exposure to violence was amplified in adolescence and young adulthood, especially among young women.
For this reason, preventing children from being subject to serious and persistent adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) is important for building human capital and promoting human development.
What is being done?
Given that intervening to prevent violent crime (especially interpersonal violence) and break entrenched cycles of violence is essential for growing the economy and improving the nation’s health, behavioural and social outcomes, and given the significant impact of violence on children’s mental health and development, what is being done to combat violence against children?
According to the ISS policy paper, in 2017, South Africa was spending R126.71-billion (9.68% of expenditure) on the criminal justice system and R45-billion on private security. But despite this, it reported “no apparent correlation between spending more on the criminal justice system, increasing the number of police, and a reduction in crime rates”.
By contrast, in the same year, the country spent just R9-billion (less than 1% of the Department of Social Development’s national and provincial budget) on violence prevention or early intervention.
This is despite the link established by the Save the Children study between preventing children from witnessing and experiencing violence, and ensuring that they have a good start in life, with building an inclusive economy in the medium to long term and growth in GDP:
“Not investing sufficiently in preventing… violence against children contributes significantly and directly to lowered human capital, which severely impinges on our country’s economy. That is because children who experience neglect and abuse, or who witness violence, are likely to go on to repeat the cycle of deprivation and disadvantage. This is exacerbated by exposure to violence in the home, stressed parents, harsh corporal punishment at school and at home, and bullying at school. Together this creates a toxic mix that massively reduces human potential and lays the basis for continuing cycles of violence.”
According to Naicker, the country’s Violence Prevention Forum, which consists of research institutions, government departments and non-governmental organisations, recommends the adoption of the following violence prevention definition into approaches for development across all social, health and economic policies and practices:
“Violence prevention is the whole of society working deliberately and sustainably to remove sources of harm and inequality, and heal woundedness, by intentionally growing an ethic of mutual care and inclusion to build peace.”
But the government places the onus for violence prevention on NGOs which are notoriously erratically funded, making it hard to quantify how much money is being spent on these initiatives.
Nevertheless, many are making a significant impact in their communities and families, most notably the South African Parenting Programme Implementers Network (Sappin). A network of 12 core non-profit (NPO) members with shared values of collaboration, ethical and cultural sensitivity and support for staff, Sappin runs many research-based parenting programmes across the country to foster secure and non-violent home environments for children.
One such project is at Touwsranten near Wilderness in the Western Cape, an eight-year community intervention run by Sappin’s Seven Passes Initiative, the Institute of Security Studies and the UCT Psychology Department between 2012 and 2020.
Touwsranten is a rural community comprising 762 households and about 2,245 inhabitants. According to 2011 census data, almost half of the adults in the community were unemployed, not economically active or discouraged work seekers. Just nine residents had more than a matric certificate. In 2016, only 20% of residents weren’t receiving one or more government grant.
A 2013 survey found that 60% of families described running out of money to buy food four or more times in the past month.
It also reported that 12.7% of the children aged six to 18 suffered from anxiety or depression which should have been receiving treatment, and 15.3% of the children of the same age experienced behavioural problems that needed treatment. Parents’ inconsistent discipline and use of spanking and slapping were strongly related to children’s behavioural problems, and to their anxiety and depression.
A third of parents who had a partner described experiencing intimate partner violence and one-fifth of parents reported such high levels of parenting stress that they were classified as being at risk of child abuse.
Surveyed parents identified unemployment, illicit drugs, particularly methamphetamine (tik), public drinking, petty crime and a lack of recreational facilities as factors negatively impacting the safety of children. They noted that physical and verbal abuse, bullying and neglect of children were common.
The environment in this community was typical of many others in South Africa, with parents “stressed and disempowered by the very difficult socioeconomic circumstances in which they raise their children and the compounded effects of racialised intergenerational trauma and poverty”. Further, in Touwsranten, as is common across South Africa, violence in the home and community was undermining the safety and happiness of its children.
The longitudinal intervention which aimed to show that it’s possible to develop and support “positive, non-violent parenting skills that help parents keep their children safe in and outside the home, and reduce parenting stress”, consisted of four parenting programmes. These were designed to increase positive parenting, reduce corporal punishment and provide parents with social support.
The goal was improved parent mental health, reduced parenting stress, and better communication and relationships between caregivers and children. It also consisted of several community initiatives to clean up the community, fix play areas and infrastructure for children and encourage accountability for positive parenting choices.
Evaluation of the programmes found that an optimal return on investment for parenting programmes was impossible unless material conditions changed for parents, and there were reductions in intimate partner violence, substance abuse and mental health problems.
Nevertheless, the programme, attended by one-fifth of parents over its duration, resulted in decreases in parenting stress and in both children’s externalising behaviours (through which the child makes their distress visible to others such as fighting or stealing or related conduct problems) and internalising behaviours (when a child’s distress is kept internal and may manifest as anxiety and depression).
Behavioural problems among younger children decreased by 33%. It also saw a reduction in the use of corporal punishment, an increase in positive parenting (even among those who did not attend a programme), and a slight improvement in parents’ mental health.
Moreover, changes at family level were evident in Touwsranten. The Smit family* entered a parenting programme for teens shortly after their sons were returned to them eight years after they were removed and placed in foster care due to the parents’ abuse of alcohol. The family was reunited because one of the boys had begun using drugs and the foster family no longer wanted to foster them.
These factors created a high-risk environment, making intervention critical. The programme gave them the skills as a family to handle difficult relationships in the family and cope with stress.
The intervention helped the father, Dan*, to control his anger and become calmer. He started fishing with the boys, cooking for them and cleaning the garden together. The boys responded by praising their dad. Their mom, Marie*, the breadwinner, began to spend more time with her sons and praise them for their positive behaviour. The family now love talking and doing activities together.
In KwaZulu-Natal, the NGO Give a Child a Family tells the story of two little girls, Sindi and Thembi*, who were placed in their care after being removed from their mother. When the organisation’s social worker met their mom, Bongi Thola*, to try to assist her to be reunified with her daughters, she confessed to feeling like she had nothing to give her girls. She was struggling to make ends meet, lived in a tiny home and her boyfriend had no interest in her children. She had lost hope of having her daughters returned.
The social worker offered her assistance, inviting her to a parenting skills programme. Bongi initially declined, but within a week she had changed her mind. She broke up with her boyfriend and joined the course. To the children’s delight, they were returned to her soon thereafter with supervision and follow-up meetings.
Six months later, the social worker was visiting Sindi and Thembi’s school when she was hailed by the principal. “What have you done with Mrs Thola?” he asked. “She has found her voice. She is talking to the other parents and telling them to get involved with their homework and school activities, she is telling the parents how to discipline their children.”
The course she attended convinced Bongi that money, or the lack thereof, was not significant. She learnt the importance of connecting with her children and how being an adult who is crazy about them helps them thrive.
Nor is it just at-risk children who have been placed in statutory services whose lives can be changed by parenting interventions. The Seven Passes Initiative tells many stories about families in Touwsranten where the programmes came in time to help parents deal with stress, anger and risky behaviours, saving the children from the adverse impact of poor parenting.
Its mom and baby parenting programme transformed a teenager’s experience of motherhood. Teenage moms experiencing a crisis pregnancy may abandon, neglect or abuse their baby. Tami* was a 15-year-old mom who was not interested in her baby or parenting the child. With the help of Tami’s mom, the parenting facilitator who ran the programme supported her to be able to go back to school and balance school with caring for her baby.
Violence a language of love
Dr Dee Blackie who runs Courage, a long-term community engagement change-management programme focused on prevention and early intervention in child protection, echoes Sappin’s concern that high levels of violence perpetrated against children in South Africa are exacerbated by people’s desire for quick fixes, instead of meaningful long-term approaches to behaviour change.
Courage workshops help communities envision the kind of world they would like to create for their children. They then identify the child protection challenges in their community, understand and prioritise these challenges, and develop empowered solutions to address them. Courage helps them understand the legal child protection and safeguarding process, identify community partners, and the values that will drive the achievement of their vision, and ultimately to create a community-based action plan.
Blackie tells a story from a workshop she ran in Alberton, Gauteng, about a young girl who spent the night out with her boyfriend. On her return, her father beat her so badly she ended up in hospital for a month. When social workers asked the father, who was imprisoned for the crime, why he did it, his response was, “because I love her”.
The programme helped the community understand that violence had become a language of love. It made them realise that especially among parents, they had to teach a new language of care and empathy to resolve conflict, instead of violence.
Similarly, in a workshop run with children in Diepsloot, a notoriously violent township in Johannesburg, a young man explained that he now had words to describe children’s daily reality. Violence was so normalised in his community that children weren’t aware that the violence perpetrated against them was problematic.
Prevention interventions allowed the community to finally “speak up” and advocate for change.
Policing is a much easier sell than prevention. But it is parenting programmes like those run by Sappin, and community mapping processes like Courage, that can minimise violence against children and child homicide. If care for individual children isn’t sufficiently motivating, the cost to the country and human capital of adverse childhood experiences, especially violence, should drive funds to prevention interventions.
As we pack up our 16 Days of Activism pins and posters for another year, and return to a lived experience where violence against children and its impact are routine and mostly invisible, we should require nothing less. DM
* Names changed to protect their privacy.
Article originally printed in the Daily Maverick 15.12.2022
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