Child support ‘top-up’ welcomed
THE Centre for Child Law welcomed the passing of the Social Assistance Amendment Bill by the National Assembly in Parliament this week.
It said this was a step closer to a legal solution to the “foster care crisis” that has been going on for almost 10 years.
The bill gives the minister of social development – with the concurrence of the minister of finance – the power to prescribe that an additional payment be linked to a social grant.
The centre’s Zita Hansungule said they fully supported the proposal for a “top-up” to the child support grant to be provided to relatives caring for orphaned children as an alternative to the foster child grant. “This will enable relatives caring for orphans to apply directly to the SA Social Security Agency rather than having to first wait for a social worker investigation and a court order.”
She said this would also drastically lessen the pressure on the foster care system that is causing the crisis in the child protection system, particularly the children’s courts that deal with such matters. “This shift will be in the interests of all children affected by the crisis – namely abused, neglected and orphaned children.”
The foster care system has, for many decades, functioned with the number of children in foster care placements remaining below 50000. However, when the number of orphans started to increase rapidly in the early 2000s because of the HIV pandemic, the then minister of social development, Zola Skweyiya, encouraged relatives caring for orphans to apply for the foster child grant, rather than the child support grant. The foster care grant is three times the value of the child support grant and therefore this policy shift resulted in an exponential rise in the number of children in the foster care system.
Hansungule said that in 2010, there were more than 500 000 foster care grants in payment
– 10 times the number that had previously been accommodated by the foster care system.
She said despite increases in the number of social workers over these years, the high numbers of foster care cases soon overburdened the child protection system, especially the social workers and children’s courts, who had to do the applications and two-yearly court-order extension processes, resulting in large backlogs.
Multiple concerns have been raised over the years by civil society organisations and practitioners about the negative impact that using the foster care system for orphans living with relatives will have. Some of these concerns include orphans (and their caregivers) experiencing long delays in accessing foster care grants because of the time-consuming process of foster care placements by social workers and children’s courts.
Hansungule said it was apparent in 2003 that the foster care system would not be able to cope with all the orphans in need. According to her, the capacity of the child protection system has been greatly strained by the need to enrol and monitor large numbers of children in the foster care system, leaving hundreds of thousands of severely abused and neglected children without the responsive protection services they need.
“In 2011, the foster care system collapsed, with 120 000 children losing their grants due to social workers and courts not being able to extend their foster care court orders in time. Another 300 000, whose court orders had expired, were at risk of losing their grants if a solution was not urgently found.”
The centre turned to the court in 2011 after which an agreement was reached, that Social Development would find a legal solution to the issue by 2014. However, due to lack of progress in designing and implementing a solution, the order had to be extended three times.
The passing of the Social Assistance Amendment Bill is the first step in addressing the problem. It has been sent to the National Council of Provinces before it is sent to the president.