The arrest of a Limpopo mother accused of killing her 11-month-old baby on the first day of child protection week has brought into sharp focus the dangers SA children face from their own parents.
Police arrested the 42-year-old mother of three for allegedly beating her child to death in front of her 11-year-old daughter at Ha-Lambani-Tswinganani village, outside Thohoyandou in Limpopo.
It is still unclear what may have led the woman to commit the crime against her own baby. There have been similar cases of parents accused of killing their children in the past.
According to SA child rights organisations stress, rage, hate, revenge and even psychological issues are to blame for the high rate of parents killing their own children.
Child protection lead at Save The Children SA, Divya Naidoo, said when parents felt stress or rage, children were often the easiest targets.
“We find people today are extremely stressed, particularly now because of the pandemic. When parents are feeling particularly stressed they get frustrated and that ends up being taken out on the children because they are the easiest targets. Children are not always in a position to defend themselves,” said Naidoo.
Naidoo said South Africans had forgotten the values of protecting children and those who were vulnerable.
“A child is no longer someone to be protected and cared for. People have this attitude that they own their children and they belong to them, and therefore they can do whatever they want to them, so hurting and harming children has become normalised and seen as an acceptable way of raising children,” she said.
Naidoo said adults also used children in conflicts with other adults that ended up with innocent children dying.
“We also use children. Adults use children to punish other adults. You find a lot of killing of children has been because of a couple. When one person decides that a relationship is over and the other is saying no, then they figure out how to punish the other and make them hurt. The punishment is taking the children away and killing them,” she said.
She added that there were also a large number of child deaths that were suspected to be a result of violence in the home but were written off as accidents.
Clinical director of Teddy Bear Clinic Dr Shahda Omar said though we saw parents harming their children as an enigma, it was not a new phenomenon and a lot of child murders were underreported.
“Recently we saw the mother of an 11-month-old baby who allegedly killed her child. What drives her to do that? Sometimes mothers are not of a sound frame of mind and could feel rattled or desperate, which, of course, does not justify the crime. Sometimes mothers feel this is the only solution,” said Omar.
Psychologist Dr Neziswa Titi from the Children's Institute said when some women were coerced by society into having children they could suffer from post-partum post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“Some people experience this after giving birth or after giving birth to a child due to trauma,” she said.
Titi said society expected women to want to naturally have children and this romanticisation of becoming a mother was not always experienced by all women.
“They can’t take care of children or their basic needs and this can lead to a sense of hopelessness,” she said.
Titi said the effects of apartheid on how children were raised in SA was also a reason behind the high levels of violence. This had led to a society where many fathers were absent in the raising of children and mothers were under pressure economically and emotionally.
She said policy changes such as in the children’s amendment bill would possibly allow fathers equal rights to their children, which could help alleviate pressure on mothers.
