At the time I thought that sounded a bit lame, but I figured I'd wait and see. A year and a half later, it seems they haven't done much, and the minister was shuffled right on out in Zuma's recent cabinet reshuffle.
Why I am thinking of this now is that in the past week I've heard two terrible stories. Firstly, I heard of a three year old girl who was raped. My aunt knows the child's mother. Then these is this story of the girl who was raped by two boys at school last week. I read today that there will be no charges against the two boys, due to lack of evidence. When the teachers first heard about the rape, they did nothing. In fact, some even laughed at the girl, or so I have read. The police even waited to go to the school to investigate the rape, because the children were writing exams.
All of which got me thinking about what a desperate situation we are in as a country, where the weakest among us are shamelessly expolited and abused by those more powerful. And the law seems to have little interest, or little serious will, to stop this. It really is a sickness in our society, firstly that a three year old can be raped, secondly that it has become almost unremarkable that a three year old was raped, and thirdly that men get away with this all the time - the conviction rate for sexual crimes is painfully low. The same, of course, applies to a rape among school children.
And then I realised why having a specific ministry to address this is actually so important. I suppose it is just a matter of what is done within that ministry. It can either seriously adress the massive problem we have, or it can be another excuse for some lavishly catered committee meetings and rallys that have no real effect on anything.
So with that in mind, I thought about some ideas of what I would like to see the ministry of women, children and persons with disabilities do. This is just a few ideas that sprang to my mind, add yours if you have any!
Ideas for the ministry of women, children and persons with disabilities:
- Work with research organisations and universities to identify and investigate the causes of the high levels of sexual violence we have. I went to a talk by Dr Wally Serote earlier this year, and he made the interesting point that we really need to enlist universities to do research on our nation's problems. We have difficult problems, he told us, we need to get intelligent people to solve them. Our universities need to be putting their minds to solving our problems. Quite right. The ministry could fund specific research projects on relevant areas, and possibly fund some postgraduate student scholarships for students doing research in these areas. Research funding would be given with time frames and clear deliverables, research findings would have to be presented to the ministry, and so on. This research would direct the programmes run by the department. Research would also be commissioned on the projects run by the ministry and potential projects being considered.
- Massive advertising campaigns. Maybe I will be shot for this, but I think sexual violence is possibly even as much of a crisis in our society as HIV/AIDS. We need to have billboards and radio ads and plays at festivals and slots in Generations. The exact nature of the campaign will be based on what our research tells us. For example, if we learn that child rape is party caused by beliefs that sex with virgin children cures AIDS, then that will be addressed. If we find that mothers are aware that their children are being abused but turn a blind eye because the abuser is providing for them financially, or is a relative, then that will be addressed in the campaigns. If we find that social networking platforms are being used to lure young people into vulnerable situations, we will address that in ad campaigns. The campaigns will directly speak to whatever we identify as the main issues.
- Keeping children safe. Many children are left with relatives, neighbours, etc. when parents go out to work. In these situations children can sometimes be vulnerable to abuse. We would look seriously at ways to address this. As I understand it there are already government grants (is this the right word?) for creches for young children - we would assess how this is working at present, how it could be improved, and expanded. We would also advertise available creches. We would also investigate other ways to protect young children. The possibility of tax cuts for businesses who provide child care for mothers springs to mind.
- Train police and fix up the courts. I believe this is being done, but as far as I know the situation is still pretty much a complete disaster. Investigations get messed up, court cases go on for years and years, files get lost, etc etc. I think these are problems for the justice system across the board, but the effect of them is so much more extreme for violent crime against vulnerable groups - women and children. I know we can't snap our fingers and fix up our courts entirely, but perhaps some political clout can be thrown at cases involving sexual violence. There must be swift punishment in these cases. To protect the victims, and to deter potential future crimes. A lawyer friend of mine once told me that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.
- Enlist teacher's unions. Teacher's unions have a reputation of protecting teachers accused of abusing children. I'm not sure if this reputation is warranted, but the ministry would pin down teachers unions to make unequivocal statements that they support the efforts of the ministry to investigate any allegations of abuse, and take action against any teachers found guilty.
- Enlist the education department. We would also work with the education department in investigations of abuse at schools.
- Get a cracking legal team. We would have a top top notch legal team whose jobs it would be to make sure that people who need to be fired (teachers abusing children, for example), would be fired, people who need to be jailed would be jailed, and so on.
- Address child porn. Our cracking legal team would also advise the ministry on areas such as child porn, and on these cell phone applications and sites that allow for easy distribution of porn. I recently heard that a problem nowadays is young kids making pornographic videos of each other and distributing them. If this is being done through a particular cell phone application we would try to enlist the help of the application developer to prevent child porn being trafficked through their application. If necessary, we would consider our options for taking legal action against application developers. We would also work with (and if necessary, take action against) social networking platforms where young people are vulnerable to abuse.
