Tasneemah Cornelissen-Nordien
Cape Town - As we commemorate National Child Protection Week from May 29 to June 5, we should also create awareness about the continued vulnerability of South Africa’s children as incidences of child abuse increase at an alarming rate.
Why are we failing so miserably? The answer may lie in an overemphasis on dealing with abuse after it has occurred, with a focus on remedial services, and not prevention.
Service providers such as social workers often indicate that their case loads are too high. Although our government acknowledges the shortage of social workers, it still blames them for failing at their duties, especially those related to child protection.
Considering the lack of resources in social welfare, it seems evident that a change of focus is needed in how social ills such as child abuse are addressed.
A proactive stance in reinvigorating community participation to equip parents and caregivers with the necessary tools to protect children is needed.
As the African proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Community and group work intervention in social work practice offers the opportunity to render prevention services; however, it appears to be neglected as the focus is on remedial action.
Furthermore, in organisations where community work projects do exist, they seem to be driven by neo-liberal tendencies.
These organisations are required by the state to meet numerical targets, as opposed to measuring the impact of their interventions. This has resulted in our community-based child protection projects becoming awareness campaigns that offer information to the masses and are not developmental in nature, as required by the 1997 White Paper on Social Welfare and the 2013 Framework for Social Welfare Services.
Additionally, campaigns related to child protection and the prevention of child abuse often target the children, instead of the adults in their lives.
This places undue responsibility on children to protect themselves. It is the adults in their lives who need to take responsibility to protect children and to be equipped with the necessary tools to fulfil this important responsibility.
Child protection programmes should thus be aimed at educating parents, caregivers and other adults in the lives of children on how to keep them safe.
These programmes should empower parents, caregivers and all other adults in children’s lives with skills to raise well-rounded, responsible citizens. And citizens who are equipped with skills to engage with others positively, thus mitigating the risks of child abuse.
Children need and like boundaries as they are important for their development. It is therefore the responsibility of adults to model appropriate behaviour.
Positive discipline offers opportunities to engage with children in a meaningful manner, where positive boundaries can be set and where children can grow into well-rounded adults.
Positive discipline is, however, time-consuming and requires patience and a willingness to repeat, redo and restart several times.
Equipping parents and caregivers with the necessary tools that encourage children to be part of a solution, rather than be seen as a problem, can foster positive relationships between adults and children. This can also mitigate the risks of child abuse and address this societal ill.
We need fundamental changes and many prevention projects, which target adults rather than children, to begin to protect our children properly against the injustices they face.
A good place to start would be at each home, where people should have uncomfortable conversations about where we are at in our thinking regarding discipline and what the responsibility of every adult is to protect children.
If we can manage to do this, we’ll be a step closer as a society to making the lives of our children just that little bit more bearable.
Dr Cornelissen-Nordien is a lecturer in the Department of Social Work at Stellenbosch University.
Cape Times