#Stillnotfound: Missing Children in South Africa

Author: Emser, Monique & van der Watt, Marcel

Abstract: In the year following South Africa’s first inclusive democratic national elections, Nelson Mandela (1995) famously proclaimed that: ‘There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.’ As a new democracy, South Africa has had to grapple with high levels of interpersonal violence attributed to post-conflict societies. Harris (n.d.) suggests that ‘[w]hile the past still impacts on present forms of violence, new trends, targets and perpetrators have also emerged within South Africa’s democratic-era (some in direct response to democratisation itself).’ Unfortunately, children are often its silent victims. Despite expansive child protection laws, which seem to have had little impact on the prevalence of crimes committed against them and by them, children remain objects of exclusion. Hsiao et al. (2018) found that while children were disproportionately affected by high levels of violence, political and financial investment to address this remained low. Much violence against children remains unreported and unrecorded (Optimus Study 2016), due in part to the culture of silence that pervades our society. Using the recent spate of child abductions and missing children cases, which have caught popular attention and sparked moral outrage, we examine the issue of missing children in South Africa within the wider phenomenological framework of violence against children. Over the past 18 years, approximately 16 000 children have been reported missing. 25 percent of these children have never been found. This does not include the number of cases that are not reported to authorities. While statistics only provide a snapshot of the problem, we interrogate the cases of the ‘missing’ missing using data from our own research, Missing Children South Africa and the South African Police Service. Using an interpretive approach, we reflect on our lived experiences working in a network of state and civil society stakeholders engaging with such cases. We conclude that missing children cases are intricately intertwined with the layers of violence that have become embedded in South African society in the democratic era. We offer a series of policy recommendations to address this complex issue.

Keywords: missing children, violence against children, abductions, kidnappings, human trafficking, interpersonal violence, structural violence, child protection