CAPE TOWN, South Africa – At night, Amanda Zitho worries that her little boy is shaking and cold in the coffin and wants to take a blanket. He knows that Wandi has died and disappeared and is meaningless, but that doesn’t stop the pain.
Wandi was 5 years old when he was killed in April, allegedly strangled with a rope by a neighbor in Johannesburg – another child dead in a country where there are too many.
According to official figures, about 1,000 children are killed each year in South Africa, almost three a day. But this statistic, no matter how horrible, may be insufficient.
Shanaaz Mathews believes that many more children are victims of crimes that are not properly investigated, not prosecuted or completely missed by the authorities. Official figures are “just the tip of the iceberg,” said Mathews, director of the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town and probably the country’s leading expert on child homicide.
In a country where more than 50 people are killed every day, children are not special and are not spared.
“Violence has taken root” in the South African psyche, Mathews said.
“How do we break that cycle?” she asked.
In 2014, he embarked on a research project to discover the true extent of those child deaths. She did this by having forensic pathologists put the bodies of hundreds of newborns, infants, young children and teenagers on examination tables to determine exactly how they died.
Analyzes of child deaths are common in developed countries, but were never done in South Africa before the Mathews project. As feared, the discoveries were grim.
A year later, pathologists examined the bodies of 711 children at two graves in Cape Town and Durban and concluded that more than 15% of them had died as a result of the killings. For context, the official analysis of the deaths of children in the UK last year found that 1% of its child deaths were homicides. Mathews’ research showed that homicide was the second most common cause of death for children in these two wards.
“And the numbers don’t go down,” she said. “If something happens, it goes up.”
There are two patterns in South Africa. Teenagers are swallowed by the desperate rate of violent street crimes in the country. But also a large number of young children at least 5 years old are victims of deadly violence detected not by a criminal with a gun or knife on the street corner, but by mothers and fathers, relatives and friends, in kitchens and rooms during the day, around dinner tables and in front of the TVs.
Deadly child abuse is where the justice system often fails and cases “fall through the cracks,” Mathews said.
There was, she says, the case of a 9-month-old child who had seizures after being left in kindergarten. Although he rushed to the hospital, the child died.
Doctors found serious head injuries and told his mother to go to the police, but no one followed. My mother never reported death. When investigators tried to revive the case almost two years later, the child had long been buried and the evidence was cold.
Joan van Niekerk, a child protection expert, reports numerous cases tainted by police ineptitude and corruption.
“Sometimes I go through stages when I’m more upset with the system than I am with the perpetrators and that’s not good,” she said. She said that justice for children in South Africa was unacceptably “difficult to achieve”.
And the failures of justice sometimes lead to more deaths.
The neighbor initially accused of killing Wandi Zitho was released and the case was temporarily suspended because police did not provide enough evidence, probably due to a backlog in forensic evidence, according to a police officer working on the case. A few months later, the woman was arrested again and charged with killing two other children.
Then there was the case of Tazne van Wyk.
It follows
The government of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, has COVID-19, announced its office …
Tazne was eight years old when her body was found in February, dumped in a sewer near a highway almost two weeks after she disappeared. She was abducted, raped and killed, police said.
Tazne’s parents blame the correctional system for the conditional release of the man accused of killing their daughter, despite a history of violent crimes against children. He has once violated his parole. They blame the police for not acting on a piece of advice that could have saved Tazne in the hours after her disappearance.
The case had a high profile. The police minister spoke at Tazne’s funeral and admitted mistakes. “I failed this child,” he admitted, pointing to Tazne’s small white coffin, adorned with gold. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the van Wyk house and promised significant action.
Nine months later, Tazne’s parents feel that everything was a lip service.
“How many children after Tazne have already died? Were they abducted? Were they killed? Nothing is happening yet, “said her mother, Carmen van Wyk.
Don’t shed tears. Instead, anger bubbles inside her and her community. The homes of the suspect and his family members were set on fire following Tazne’s murder.
It’s not just the police stopping the abuse, said Marc Hardwick, who has been a police officer for 15 years, 10 of them as a detective in a child protection unit.
He remembers a case from 20 years ago. A 6-year-old woman was beaten to death by her father because she was watching cartoons and, distracted like any 6-year-old child, did not listen to him.
When their father was arrested and taken away – he was later sentenced to life in prison – the 9-year-old victim’s cousin approached Hardwick and said, “I think you stopped my bad dreams today.”
Clearly, the children in that household had had a nightmare and the other adults had remained silent, Hardwick said. “The reality is that child abuse is not something people want to talk about.”