Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
‘Hatred for children and women’
Spate of murders condemned Courtney’s family upset with march
CAPE TOWN this week reeled at the news that yet another child had been found raped and murdered, the 19th young murder victim this year.
Following days of searching for missing three-year-old, Courtney Pieters, her body was found on Sunday, buried in a shallow grave.
Mortimer Saunders, a long- standing family friend who lived in their house, has been accused of raping and murdering her.
The case has sparked widespread anger and introspection, with community leaders, politicians and ordinary South Africans demanding answers to the epidemic of violence, particularly against women and children.
Patric Solomons, director of children’s rights advocacy organisation Molo Songololo, said: “The rape and killing of a child, young woman or any person is an act of cowardliness, of abuse of power and an act of violence and evil. Offenders prey on the young and vulnerable. It is an act of hatred for children and women – misogyny. In some cases, they rape and kill children as revenge or hatred for the child’s mother or father.”
Solomons said easy access to pornography often played a role in the killing of young girls. “The ease of access to pornography and its impact cannot be ruled out. Many teens and young men try to act out porn scenes and to prove their masculinity and bravado with peers,” he said.
Former Elsies River Community Policing Forum deputy chairperson Imraahn Mukaddam pointed to failings in policing, a problem also highlighted by President Jacob Zuma when he visited Courtney’s family earlier this week.
Mukaddam said he had resigned from his post on the CPF because “we have failed that family and the little girl”.
“I feel we failed as a CPF; we failed to recognise the urgency of this matter. I would have started with the process of elimination, starting with every single person in the house, then move on to the neighbours. The child could have been found much sooner,” he said.
Mukaddam also blamed the lack of services in poorer areas for the high crime rate, making specific reference to a heap of rubble just a street away from Courtney’s home.
“The areas are not serviced like Parow, Camps Bay and Constantia, and that is sad because our areas look worse than they should. There is no proper lighting and very little cleaning is done.”
Shanaaz Matthews, director of UCT’s Children’s Institute, said child homicide was at an “epidemic” level. A recent study Matthews conducted found South Africa experienced 454 child murders in 2009 – more than any other country in the world.
Experts have pointed out this is part of a general climate of violence in many parts of Cape Town, which ranks as the murder capital of Africa.
“Where there is a high incidence of violence, generally there is a high incidence of violence against children,” said Joan van Niekerk, national co-ordinator of the anti-child
Experts have Town
abuse NGO Childline. “And children are unable to protect themselves.”
Reverend Philip Bam, chairperson of the Grassy Park CPF, has worked on several missing children cases and says much of the blame for the situation lies with the criminal justice system.
He said police often failed to search neighbours’ homes despite that the perpetrator was more often than not someone known to the child or the family. He pointed to the 2003 Sasha-Leigh Crook case, where the neighbour turned out to be the killer.
Bam said perpetrators were sometimes given light or suspended sentences. He proposed automatically withholding bail if there was sufficient evidence against an accused.
He said he had been driven to support the reintroduction of the death penalty, which he used to oppose. “It’s gone on far too long and is happening too frequently, and one reason is people know they won’t have to pay with their life.”
Matthews and Van Niekerk pointed to structural issues. They said cycles of violence had in some cases “normalised” violence and women and girls were the most vulnerable, with girls under five most at risk among children.
Research indicated children who grew up abused or witnessed their mother being abused were more likely to abuse children or enter relationships with an abusive partner.
Van Niekerk said young men and boys were often not taught empathy or how to nurture. “Their need for a relationship and their need for nurturing, sometimes they seek this from their victims in harsh and inappropriate ways.”
She argued increased policing was not an answer since that would shift abuse indoors without addressing root causes.
But she praised programmes such as Eye on the Child, which enlists local volunteers to watch over children after school, and said Cape Town should invest in this.
In some cases, a partner kills children to punish the other partner, Van Niekerk said.
Matthews said violence was largely, but not entirely, the result of entrenched poverty and that unemployment led to conflict over scarce resources and substance abuse. In areas such as the Cape Flats, institutions such as schools and churches, which protected children and reinforced moral values were sometimes weakened, Bam noted.
Another issue was that parents had to work without anyone caring for their young children. “That leaves the kids exposed”, Matthews said.
Van Niekerk pointed to the role of substance abuse, saying many perpetrators were under the influence when they committed crimes. Bam, however, said poverty was no excuse.
“You can maintain your moral values although you are poor,” he said. “Today, we’ve got all this materialism that we don’t spend enough time teaching our children properly. That’s what I think.”
National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa’s acting spokeswoman Phakamile Hlubi said in a statement: “The time for cheap talk is over. Women and children are under daily attack, what is required now is direct action from all spheres of government, and from society as a whole.” AS COURTNEY Pieters’ family prepares to lay her to rest, another peace march is being planned to coincide with the slain toddler’s funeral. But this doesn’t sit well with the bereaved family.
After yesterday’s peace march to the site where 3-yearold Courtney was found, family spokeswoman Roegchanda Pascoe said the planned march for this morning had upset the Pieters family.
“The timing is wrong,” Pascoe said.
“The family thinks any march in support of them is good, but the marchers could have chosen a better time or gone to support the family at the funeral.”
Jalal Allie, Topform Athletics Club assistant treasurer, confirmed the club organised the march, but he added he wasn’t the best person to respond to the Weekend really Argus’s question.
Russel Mehl, the club’s chairman, said they had not met the family to make arrangements, as he expected the family was “inundated” with other arrangements.
Furthermore, meeting with the family wasn’t the march’s focus, he said.
Mehl said the march, expected to attract 2 000 people, was meant to highlight the issue of violence against women and children.
Mother- of- two, Michelle Scholtz- Thomas, an Elsies River resident, said she joined the march because of the spate of violent crimes against women and children on the Cape Flats in recent months.
“We as ordinary moms, dads, brothers and sisters from the community need to do something and we have decided to start with an awareness and solidarity peace walk.
“This is to show that the Elsies River community, along with all other communities, is here. We are present. We feel the family’s pain and sorrow. We need to rise up in any form possible. We don’t have all the answers, but we can’t do nothing. I’m tired of just shaking my head at the news.”
Courtney’s funeral will be held at the Modderdam Cem- etery in Belhar today.
Following the burial, Pascoe said the Pieters family would spend the next few days gaining strength for the court case.