Suffer the Children - Cape Time, 21 October 2009

I write in response to the wonderfully informative article by Mr Sipho Ngwema in the Cape Times, page 9, yesterday, 19 October 2009: “Strategy, not bullets, will stop criminals”.

The story of the child mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs is not an unknown one – it represents 500 children a day. That is the statistic of rapes committed against children in South Africa on a daily basis.

The Victims’ Service Charter is supposed to prevent further trauma to happen to victims of all crimes in this country. The tragedy of this it that the VSC is useless when the service providers themselves [SAPS, District surgeons, hospital and clinic personnel, social services,
prosecutors] either don’t know their role or are too busy with case loads in order to protect victims from further trauma.

In addition to this, the VSC it is a pretty piece of paper that makes the authors of it look good, but the people at grass roots level are not empowered to use it.

Last week the case of Randolene Fortune was in the Parow Magistrates’ Court. The magistrate wanted to throw the case out due to the fact that Randolene’s mother was ill prepared, emotionally to give evidence.

Allowing the alleged perpetrator a speedy trial - He has rights too. She could not get to the counselors to assist her and her family. Did it not occur to the magistrate that perhaps Randolene’s mother could not afford to get to a state-provided counselor? Fortunately, the case continued the next day and RAPCAN assisted Randolene’s mother.

The author mentions the liberation struggle under the capable leadership of the ANC then – today we are dealing with a different struggle: to keep our children and families safe in a world where politicians pay lip-service, the president of the country has no comment, the national police commissioner is auditing where the CPU personnel have been deployed to when they were disbanded; and while all of this is happening, our nation is crying out, our children are being raped and murdered, crime is rife.

Not one of our leaders in the ANC has come up with a strategy to fight crime. Police personnel are struggling because they don’t have the infrastructure to deal with the magnitude of crimes. With regard to the re-institution of the Child Protection Units for example, our Bheki Cele is doing an audit and he is still busy with it. We are still waiting for him to comment on his strategy that will ensure that no sexual offender [even first timers] gets bail, that it is easy for people to report rapes and crimes against women and children without secondary victimization, that the Child Protection Units are at every police station and that they are armed with professionals who know what they are doing.

No police bullets will help. We are still waiting Mr Cele, for your comment and your strategy.
Norah Papanicolaou
Director - Information Empowers!