Alison Tilley Money in hand can protect kids from neglect
Care Crisis | The R500 difference between the foster child and child support grants compromises vulnerable children. By Paula Proudlock and
YOU will remember that two months ago baby Samantha’s parents were found guilty of culpable homicide, child abuse and rape. You will recall six of Samantha’s right ribs were fractured. Four on the left had been broken at some stage prior to her death; they were healing. There were bruises on her left cheek, upper lip and the right side of her chest. Her right lung was full of blood and bruised, and the lung tissue was lacerated. In her 10-month-long life, she suffered.
And people knew. She was alleged to have been given to a woman known to her parents to raise shortly after she was born. When the woman relocated to Durban and asked to take Samantha with her, the parents are alleged to have refused and taken her away from the woman. They gave her to another woman in the neighbourhood, but when she told them that she wanted to adopt Samantha, they allegedly refused and took her back.
But there was no one to speak for baby Samantha. Not a neighbour, not a healthcare worker and certainly no social worker. South Africa has one of the most comprehensive childcare laws in the world. How on earth could this happen? There is no report of anyone speaking to authorities on her behalf. Where was everyone?
Let us focus on social workers as one of our precious resources in the battle against child abuse. The honest answer to this horrendous failure is that there are not enough social workers to meet the needs of our fractured and complex society.
In March 2012, there were only 16 740 registered social workers. Only 9 289 of them were in public practice serving children and families. The rest were in private practice or no longer practising. Compare this with the total number of police officers in South Africa — 157 000.
Even though millions of rand have been pumped into social work bursaries, the resultant trickle of social workers is not beginning to meet the need, and many of them leave the profession as soon as they can.
They are driven away by poor salaries, under-resourced offices and impossible case loads of up to 800 files each.
Many social workers have been retrenched following the nonprofit organisations’ funding crisis.
As a result, local and inter-
The law must be amended to make it clear that children staying with their extended families should not automatically access the foster care system
national donors have stopped supplying top-up money.
The money they get from the government to deliver most government welfare services does not cover their costs, yet they are faced with an increasing need from families in crisis.
All these factors combined left baby Samantha at risk and, ultimately, dead. Is she alone?
You will recall the body of the seven-month-old baby boy that was discovered by Diepsloot community members in a shack some weeks ago. It is understood he had been left alone by his mother overnight while she had gone out drinking.
After the investigation, the police realised the baby’s foot had been eaten by rats. The last reports indicate that the mother and grandmother have been charged with child neglect and that the police has expressed great concern about the many toddlers wandering the streets of Diepsloot on their own. So what is to be done?
We certainly need to get the limited number of social workers back into communities and working to prevent this type of abuse and neglect. They need to stop it where they can.
But there is one significant overwhelming factor preventing this. This precious human capital is shuffling paperwork in relation to foster child grants for orphans who are living with extended family members.
Why should that be? These children are living with family with no data to show that they are at higher risk of abuse than with their biological parents.
In fact, the evidence goes the other way — in a recent study of child murders by the Medical Research Council, the data shows that children are more at risk of murder at the hands of their biological parents than extended family carers.
The problem is essentially one of money. These families caring for orphans are not approaching social workers and children’s courts for foster care orders because these children are especially at risk and in need of protection from abuse or neglect. They are doing so because they need the money to pay for the costs of raising a child and the foster child grant is R800, whereas the child support grant is R300. That is 500 reasons to queue for the foster child grant instead of the child support grant.
The cost to the applicant is measured in waiting time — they will wait much longer (about three years) to get the court order that gives them the foster child grant, but they then get more money and the grant can last until the child is 21, whereas the child support grant stops at 18.
So, it is a perfectly rational economic choice for the family. But what of the social workers?
Each foster care order requires a children’s court to make a finding that the placement of the child is appropriate.
For the court to find that, it needs a report from a social worker. To write a report, the social worker needs to visit and interview the child and family and help them to get birth certificates, identity documents and death certificates.
And there are more than 550 000 children in that system — most of them orphans living with family. The social workers have to check that the children are okay and return to court to have their court orders extended every two years.
So that is what social workers are doing: checking up on children about whom there has been no report of neglect nor abuse, and who, statistically, are financially better off than the children living with just their mothers. Is this in the best interests of children?
The system has already collapsed under the strain — more than 100 000 foster child grants lapsed in 2010 and 2011 because social workers could not renew the court orders fast enough.
The high courts of Gauteng provided temporary relief following an application by the Centre for Child Law by “deeming” them not to have lapsed.
It placed a temporary moratorium on further lapsing. The order provided time to the department to introduce the necessary comprehensive reform by December next year.
However, the orders that were “deemed” not to have lapsed for two years lapsed again in June.
The minister has simply directed the Social Security Agency not to allow grants to lapse, despite the law that obliges the agency to pay grants only if the court order has been extended by the court. It is not lawful, although it may be practical.
How do we redirect the stream of hundreds of thousands of applicants back to the child support grant system and away from the child protection system designed to deal with children in need of urgent interventions?
How can we make sure there is a social worker for the next baby Samantha and the next seven-month-old baby in Diepsloot?
The first intervention lies with the Department of Social Development.
It must amend the law to make it clear that children staying with extended families should not automatically access the foster care system unless there are signs that the child is at risk of abuse or neglect. They should rather be directed to the child support grant and social services from child and youth care workers — a growing army of workers available to provide social support to families.
However, the child support grant is not enough to pay for even the basic costs of raising a child and it is the smallest of all the social grants.
Therefore, the amount should be increased if we are serious about strengthening parents and extended families to care for and protect their children.
In the run-up to an election, food parcels are usually the only issue social development must deal with.
However, with the epidemic of child abuse we face, it can and must act to put our front-line defence against child abuse back in place.
And it must put more money directly into families’ hands to enable families to feed, clothe, educate and protect their children from neglect.
Proudlock is the child rights programme manager at the Children’s Institute. Tilley writes in her personal capacity