Discussion | How safe are children in their homes?

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]As the country continues to mark Child Protection Month, it is important to highlight the dangers children face within their homes and how they can be protected from them. For more on this, I'm joined on the line by Miranda Jordan-Friedman from Women and Men Against Child Abuse. Miranda, good to have you on the program despite the circumstances. Now, stories involving children being abused or killed, especially inside their homes, always shocks the country.

[00:00:25]Why are homes increasingly becoming unsafe spaces for children?

[00:00:30]Yes, thank you for having me. And I mean, the the primary caregivers for any child is their mother and father. That is supposed to be where they are the safest, the most protected, where all their their wants are are met, all their needs are met. And and and the fact that children are so unsafe in their home, we're looking at far beyond something like neglect or you know, punishment about something the child's done that is abusive. We we're looking at at one's own child being raped and murdered. It is such extreme violence in a place where a child is supposed to be safe.

[00:01:11]So, this is extremely worrying and extremely worrying phenomenon in South Africa at the moment. And yes, we we are seeing a large number of these cases. Are they in the on the increase? I'm not sure statistically we have enough information right now, but they are certainly very prevalent. We've got some high profile cases as you know in court at the moment involving women as well as men involved with murdering and raping both their partners or husband or wives' children. And there are a number of reasons that this happens and I'm not sure if you want me to go through some of them with you and and why they are so difficult to police and why it's also even quite difficult for the community to to know that this is happening. But, I do think we need to be more and more aware of what is happening in our communities, in our roads, in our neighborhood.

[00:02:13]When we see a child that um perhaps does not always have the support of a whole family around them. Maybe it's just a single parent. There are incredible single parents out there by and by no means am I saying that this could be this happens very often in fact where there are both partners at home or both parents at home. So, it's it's not always the case. It's actually very very few cases we have with single parents, but in this case, it just seems that the mother was not around or not able to see the child often, and so the child was left maybe with not a big support system or enough family that was able to intervene and to check on the child regularly that this child was all right.

[00:03:03]But, as I said, there are a number of reasons that a a partner or husband or wife abuses a child to the extent that they they then rape or murder the child.

[00:03:18]And and here we have cases where somebody says, "Well, I I just simply couldn't look after this child anymore."

[00:03:24]Yes, they could be of sound mind. A lot have some mental illness or some disturbance in their life or some sort of um you know, could be alcohol, it could be drugs. And they say they they killed their child because their child would be now better off. Some people feel the burden of the child is just too much, and that they can't cope with this anymore.

[00:03:49]Some and quite often ones you see recently is where it is a revenge. It's a revenge on the husband or wife or partner that this is the most precious thing to that person being this child and and they take their revenge out for myriad of motives, yeah. Miranda, with that said, I mean, we also discussing this during child protection month, but many people feel awareness campaigns alone are simply not enough. So, I guess the bigger question here is that are we failing children as a as a society really?

[00:04:27]I think to a very, very large extent we are. I think that um children are really at the total mercy of us adults and um without proper systems in place and that by that I mean starting from the family where we have um greater family involvement to the systems that are needed when children can't be protected within the family and they need to be placed um for instance in in in foster homes.

[00:05:01]There's a shortage of that right now.

[00:05:03]There's a huge problem, as we know, with the whole baby savers and where we're putting children at the moment. The monitoring enough on the ground social workers to monitor what's happening. Um the specialized courts that we need for that. Um there's generally a a systemic problem. The investigation that is required often goes hand in hand at the same time. Um also, what happens in the children's court is is a concern for my organization because we can get involved in the criminal matter and we can monitor that very carefully and attend that and see what is happening and are we happy with the way that prosecution and the investigation is going by being in touch with the investigating officer. But when it comes to the children's court, we have very limited almost no access unless one of our social workers is there and testifying or is going to be involved.

[00:05:56]And that is often where we've seen children returned, in fact, and we are busy right now one of those cases where if we hadn't insisted that the the child was not returned to these particular parents, the child would not be alive today.

[00:06:11]Miranda, let me thank you for your time.

[00:06:13]That was Miranda Jordaan Freedman speaking to us during Child Protection Month about the urgent need to really strengthen child safety, improve reporting systems, but also ensure communities play a more active role in protecting vulnerable children. Of course, giving us her organization's perspective on this issue.