Two weeks ago Dr Graham Dickason, a South African surgeon who had recently moved to New Zealand with his wife and their three daughters, walked into a nightmare. In his apartment in Timaru, he found his three young children strangled to death. His wife, Dr Lauren Graham, has since been arrested for their murder.
The story has caught national attention in SA, with many articles and opinion pieces written about the devastating tragedy. Many opinion pieces are, correctly, sympathetic towards Lauren. Jenna Etheridge wrote a moving article titled: “I have forgiven her, she is a victim too”, while Samantha Herbst wrote the viral opinion piece titled: “Who is to blame for Dickason tragedy? We are, South Africa."
Like many people, I do not think that she is a monster even though her actions are heinous. I believe that she needed help.
On March 24 this year, I wrote an article on this column titled: “Where are fathers when women kill their babies?”, reflecting on Wendy Tapiwa Kamoto’s much-publicised killing of her newborn baby.
The young mother was vilified for her actions, called a “monster” by many and subjected to verbal abuse. Kamoto was a poor working-class woman, an immigrant, living in one of the poorest areas in SA. She exists in a country where women are still being denied termination services in public hospitals – a fact corroborated by parliament’s portfolio committee on health.
She exists in a country where a woman who is in SA illegally cannot formally consent for their child to be adopted. In fact, if an adoption social worker is contacted by an illegal immigrant about placing her child up for adoption, they are compelled to advise the relevant authorities.
She exists in a country where black working-class women have limited access to counselling services – something that she desperately needed since it was obvious that she was battling with severe postpartum depression.
And in this country, Kamoto and many women who look like her are characterised as villains when they kill their children.
But an upper middle-class white woman, a qualified doctor, commits the same act and instead of being subjected to the same treatment as Kamoto, she is showered with compassion and understanding. Her story has been trending for two weeks, because it is deemed important enough to follow up on.
The same publications writing on it have been silent on Kamoto and many other poor working-class black women who were written about once, in an accusatory tone. The message here is very clear: compassion is a preserve of certain bodies, certain women, no matter the nature of their actions.
The reality is that many women in our country and in the world are battling with postpartum depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The traumas of pregnancy and giving birth are rarely ever spoken about, forcing women who endure them to reside in shadows of fear and isolation. Childbirth is spoken about in flowery terms, and raising children is deemed a great blessing.
In such an environment, women do not have a safe space to find motherhood exhausting, traumatising, debilitating and lonely. They do not have meaningful support for their mental health. The result is the growing rate of deliberate killings of children by their mothers, and illnesses such as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy where mothers harm their children to get attention.
Mothers need institutional support. This is especially important in disadvantaged communities where their suffering is undocumented and unacknowledged. If we do not place the mental health of mothers at the centre of discourse, more children will die.
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