So Many Questions
The Department of Women, Children and the Disabled is trumpeting yet another awareness campaign against woman and child abuse. Chris Barron asked Joan van Niekerk of Childline . . .
Is the sexual abuse of children worse or just better reported? Worse. We had incidents 20 years ago, but not at the level we’re seeing now. That cannot be an issue of improved reporting because those children would have come to the attention of a medical facility because of the injuries sustained.
Is there a reluctance to report it? Definitely, especially if it is perpetrated by a family member.
Is this usually the case? It’s usually someone close to the child, yes. The minister of women, children and the disabled, Lulu Xingwana, says mothers need to look after their children better. Is this the crux of it? It’s a significant part, but we are so into motherblaming in this country. Most mothers who neglect or abandon their children were abandoned themselves by their partners. So we need to engage both mothers and fathers in the protection of their children. Never have I seen a man charged with abandonment. Somehow, we hold mothers accountable fully for the care and protection of their children. That is totally unacceptable. So the minister is reinforcing the stereotype that it’s the mothers who are to blame? Absolutely. We need to look at structural issues — at the fact that the government has failed to prepare people for parenthood. A couple of years ago, Childline approached the Department of Basic Education to teach young people parenting before they leave school, because girls are becoming mothers while still at school. We were told the minister did not like that because it would encourage young people to have sex. Is there a correlation between the increasing youth of mothers and the increasing incidents of child abuse? We know that young people are not ready for parenthood. If you teach young people about parenting, they actually delay becoming parents because they’re more aware of the responsibilities. So part of what’s happening is due to the failure of the Department of Basic Education? Life skills must include parenting. We must acknowledge that the attitude of the department has changed, but we have a generation of young parents who have not learnt anything about parenting in the school environment. Our Health Department has a wonderful opportunity to work in this area during the antenatal and postnatal phases, but it is failing to do so. We are doing nothing to screen young mothers in terms of what support systems they have, et cetera. So it is not just the Department of Women, Children and the Disabled we should be looking at? No, it is the Department of Women and Children, it’s social development, it’s health, it’s basic education. And this is the problem in this country. We’re driven by these sensationalist cases and have this massive kneejerk reaction, but no systematic approach in which we look at all the contributing factors and develop a jigsaw puzzle response so that we’re addressing each of those, but in a coordinated and carefully planned way. Should the Department of Women, Children and the Disabled be playing this coordinating role? Absolutely — and holding other departments accountable.
Does it? No. And it doesn’t consult sufficiently. It needs to consult more, particularly with the nonprofit organisation (NPO) sector.
Why doesn’t it? Neither, I might add on the issue of sexual offences, does the Department of Justice. Do government departments see NPOs as the enemy? What worries me is that ministers want to own achievements that are the work of the NPOs. Therefore you find the ministries are reluctant to pull in the NPOs, and the achievements of NPOs are flagged as the achievements of the departments themselves. This is what happened with the Sexual Offences Act. NPOs are totally excluded from the inter-sector working committee; they are not mentioned at all. And they provide victim services to a far greater degree than any government department. Is this why NPOs are not better funded — the departments are scared of being shown up? The departments want to be given the credit for the work that has been done. So sometimes the achievements of the NPO sector are not flagged as civil society achievements. Has this hampered the fight against child abuse? It has affected our ability to do our work because our relationship with the government is seen as a conflictual relationship rather than what it should be, which is a cooperative relationship. Is the fight against child and woman abuse being compromised by this attitude? I am going to reframe that and say that women and children might have better services, and there might be more in the way of effective protection, if the government and civil society worked more closely together.