Child neglect on the rise

Madam,

(swatini has a unique inMustice. , mean, there are a lot of things that are happening in the country that are inMustices. )rom the way minority groups are treated, to the way the law is enforced. We have a number of cases where women die in the hands of men, and most women are battered by the same people who are supposed to protect them.

0en e[perience violence too, and that is an inMustice that some people find to be ‘funny¶ because it means that man is not man enough. But there is an inMustice that seems to be unique to us as ema6wati and it is not treated with the urgency it deserves.

CONSEQUENCES

$ married couple can have children together, but if they separate, the man can go off with other women and have more children, while the woman is stuck at home raising children by herself, with no prospects of remarry ing. This has many consequences and some of them are the reason why there are so many inMustices in the country.

0illions of poor children and teen agers grow up without their biological fathers, and often when you ask them about it, you hear a litany of male bar barism.

,t can be difficult to embrace the e[citement of preparing for mother hood for women embarking on the Mourney alone. These women have to deal with the heartache of discovering that their partners are leaving them

and their unborn child to be with someone else.

ULTIMATUMS

2thers have to deal with being given difficult ultimatums by partners who demand they make a choice between their baby and their boyfriend.

The sad thing is, this affects women and the children more than it affects the person who left. 6ociety then blames the woman for ‘making him leave¶, forgetting that they were nev er ‘men¶ to begin with. $ man by no means is some mythological archetype of human strength and perfection, but rather someone who accepts account ability for their actions and owns up to them, no matter what. This isn¶t the easiest thing to do and accountability isn¶t really being taught in too many places these days, e[cept for maybe in the home. But it is no doubt per cent unfair to leave all the responsi bility to only one person, when it was two people who made the baby.

Nomsa