Media Flaws

I was doing some Sunday shopping when I found myself in the confectionary section. There stood a mother and daughter engaged in what appeared to be a heated debate, until the child decided to scream her lungs out, demanding some funny shaped chocolate.

As I rushed past this confrontation I then heard the mother sternly advise the daughter: "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it. Now shut up!" I hope I heard her wrong. As I strolled down the aisle the words hit me again. Surely this was an extreme threat - especially directed towards a child?

You'd think that's cruel until you think back to the recent spate of child killings. 105 children have been murdered over a year, in the Western Cape alone! 105! Excuse me for thinking that's a bit excessive, but it is.

Sonja Brown, Micaela Rossouw, Elizabeth Martin, Usindiso Mlonyeni and many more are all appurtenances of some insidiously undefined sickness that plagues our society. What is this sickness? Why hasn't anyone come out and explained these fast-becoming-common child killings? And why is it particularly rife in the Western Cape? Who and what drives these maniacs?

The latest to plead guilty is Theuns Olivier, a Zimbabwean satyromaniac. In his latest case, Olivier admits that, at the time of sodomising, torturing and killing his six year old Plettenberg Bay victim, he was "able to distinguish between right and wrong and able to appreciate the wrongfulness" of his action. He is now asking for our mercy.

How do you forgive that? He's not sick. The shrinks proved that. So what's wrong with him? Surely there's something wrong?

So as our government tries to deal with these inexplicable cases of morbid perversity, there is a growing tendency to point fingers at the parents. It's said that 80% of these child killings are committed by relatives and people familiar to the victim. But I fail to see how parents are to blame for someone else's evils. I can understand when the parents are negligent, but some of these cases can never be predicted.

At present we know that these child-killings are most rife in the rural areas. And if the fault really lies with parents; how do you then empower these rural-based parents to prevent such occurrences?

In the rural areas, one can still see cases where the grandmother is too sick to walk 10km to the general dealer store, and the teenage mother is on a gold-digging or fun-finding mission in the townships. Who else is going to get sent to the shop?

You find five-year-olds walking through the dusty long stretches of gravel road carrying illegibly written shopping lists that will see the child walking back home with a 12.5kg bag of mielie meal - if not a case of beer. The village hooligans, normally young boys, will only be too glad to relieve the child of her shopping baggage.

Worse could happen to the child, but in this instance she'll have to settle for a spanking from the granny. It happens and I've seen it over and over and over.

The rural areas continue being the preying grounds of these paedophiles and murderers. And what are we going to do?