We need action, not outrage, to stem slaughter of children
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Little Bokgabo Poo was an outgoing, confident four-year-old with a big smile who loved her daddy. Her granny Lilian
Poo believed that she had a bright future ahead of her.
But on 11 October, Bokgabo’s severed leg and arm were found in a shallow grave the day after she went missing while playing in a park in Wattville.
Piecing together eyewitness statements, CCTV footage and media accounts, a picture of her gruesome death appears. In the late afternoon of 10 October, while her mother, Tsholofelo Poo, was at a community meeting, Bokgabo was playing in the park with a fiveyear-old friend when a man approached.
Well known in the community as someone who was always around children, and who had sweets and money in his school bag, he gave the boy she was playing with R2 to buy lollipops at the local tuckshop. He agreed eagerly. When he returned, Bokgabo and the man were both gone.
Bokgabo was never seen alive again, but CCTV footage from a tavern showed the four-year-old girl approaching a shop with Ntokozo Zikhali close by.
Zikhali, self-titled “Harry Potter”, was out on bail for the rape of a nine-year-old at the time.
A week after Bokgabo’s death, the Sowetan published a front-page article titled “How many more must die?” On the page are the faces of 19 children, all murdered in the past four years. The killings reveal common themes: child rape, homicide for the removal of body parts, murder as revenge against the child’s mother, the perpetrator being out on bail or on early release after a crime against a child, unsolved child homicides and the child knowing his or her perpetrator. All involve extreme violence.
Yet what makes these children unusual is not that they were murdered, but that their stories have been told. Most are not.
Crime statistics show that an average of three to four children are murdered in South Africa every day. In addition, in the last quarter of 2021, 394 children survived attempted murder, and 2,048 children were victims of physical assault.
The same statistics indicated that the child homicide rate has increased by 22.6% quarter to quarter. As disturbing as these statistics are, they are incomplete and inadequate. Findings from a 2009 study on child homicide completed by the Medical Research Council (MRC) revealed that children under five are most likely to die of unnatural causes in the first six days of life as a result of abandonment.
The government’s research on child violence identifies interventions at individual, family, community and society level as four focal points for mitigating the risk of child homicide. But, instead of implementing research-based solutions, when confronted with the horror of murdered children, the government responds in a way reminiscent of the ancient English practice of raising a “hue and cry”.
An early form of community policing, this expression of public anger or disapproval was started when a crime was committed. The close community was required to raise the alarm and immediately work to find the perpetrator. Some common behaviours are evidenced from politicians when a child dies: party politicking and point-scoring, justifiable but ineffectual outrage, or crushing indifference.
But after each perpetrator is imprisoned and the hue and cry subsides, so does the focus on solving child homicide. That is, until the next annual event such as Child Protection Week or the 16 Days of Activism, or the next death.
Frustratingly, with proper policies and budget, the government could drastically minimise child homicide. Key interventions include: a targeted strategic focus on violence against children rather than it being subsumed into gender-based-violence interventions; an annual death review (including dead abandoned babies) to show how and why children are dying; active policing; increased numbers of social workers deployed across the country; and a functional child protection system to care for children if they are removed from their families.
Equally critical are an overhaul of conditions for bail, sentencing and parole for crimes against children, child-friendly victim support services, ending the DNA-testing backlog, and properly managing the sex offender and child protection registers.
Raising the amount of the Child Support Grant to the food poverty line would combat poverty and desperation-related violence. Also needed are the regulation of traditional healers, infrastructure upgrades and aftercare programmes to construct safe spaces for children to play, interventions to create community awareness about violence against children, and family strengthening initiatives.
Of all the MRC findings, the most staggering was that in child homicides, only 3.8% of perpetrators were strangers. The implication is that almost all children knew their killer: they were murdered by parents, family or community members.
Though shocking, it also means that family strengthening and support, positive parenting and community awareness initiatives can have a huge effect. Yet there remains no coordinated plan for minimising child homicide.
It’s time for government accountability, for strategic policy interventions and for a child-rights-focused budget. Without them, the outrage of authorities over the murder of Bokgabo and countless others is nothing more than another “hue and cry” designed to avoid both culpability and answerability for these tragic and horrifying deaths.
Government’s research on child violence identifies interventions at individual, family, community and society level as four focal points for mitigating the risk of
child homicide