CAPE TOWN, South Africa – At night, Amanda Zitho worries that her son is shivering and cold in his coffin and longs to give him a blanket. She knows Wandi is dead and gone and it is pointless, but that doesn’t stop the pain.
Wandi was 5 when he was murdered in April, allegedly strangled with a rope by a neighbor in Johannesburg – another dead child in a country where there are too many.
According to official figures, about 1,000 children are murdered in South Africa every year, almost three a day. But that statistic, horrifying as it may be, can be an undervaluation.
Shanaaz Mathews believes many more children are victims of murders that are not properly investigated, not prosecuted, or completely missed by the authorities. The official figures are “just the tip of the iceberg,” said Mathews, the director of the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town and probably the country’s greatest expert on infanticide.
In a country where more than 50 people are murdered every day, children are nothing special and they are not spared.
“Violence has become entrenched” in the psyche of South Africa, Mathews said.
“How do we break that cycle?” she asked.
In 2014 she embarked on a research project to find out the true extent of this infant mortality. She did it by asking forensic pathologists to place the corpses of hundreds of newborn babies, infants, toddlers and teens on examination tables to determine exactly how they died.
Infant mortality revisions are common in developed countries, but had never been done in South Africa before Mathews’ project. As she feared, the findings were grim.
For over a year, pathologists examined the bodies of 711 children in two morgues in Cape Town and Durban and concluded that more than 15% of them died as a result of murders. For context, the official review of infant mortality rates in Britain last year found that 1% of infant deaths were murders. Mathews’ research showed that murder was the second most common cause of death for children in those two neighborhoods.
“And the numbers aren’t going down,” she said. “If anything, they go up.”
There are two cartridges in South Africa. Teenagers are being swallowed up by the desperately high rate of violent street crime in the country. But large numbers of young children aged 5 and under are also victims of fatal violence, not by a perpetrator with a gun or a knife on a street corner, but by mothers and fathers, relatives and friends, in kitchens and living rooms, around dining tables and for TVs.
In fatal child abuse, the justice system often fails and cases “fall through the cracks,” Mathews said.
There was, she says, the case of a 9-month-old child who had seizures after being dropped off at daycare. Although the child was rushed to hospital, she died.
Doctors found serious head injuries and told the mother to go to the police, but no one followed up. The mother never reported the death. When investigators tried to revive the case nearly two years later, the baby had long been buried and the evidence was cold.
Joan van Niekerk, a child protection expert, talks about numerous cases infected by police incompetence and corruption.
“I sometimes go through phases where I’m more angry with the system than the perpetrators and that’s not good,” she said. She said justice for children in South Africa is unacceptably “hard to achieve”.
And the failure of justice sometimes leads to more deaths.
The neighbor who was originally charged with the murder of Wandi Zitho was released and the case was provisionally dropped as police did not provide enough evidence, possibly due to a backlog in analyzing forensic evidence, a police officer working on the case said. Months later, the woman was arrested again and charged with murdering two other children.
Then there was the case of Tazne van Wyk.
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Tazne was 8 when her body was found dumped in a highway drain nearly two weeks after she disappeared in February. She had been kidnapped, raped and murdered, police said.
Tazne’s parents blame the correctional system for paroling the man charged with the murder of their daughter, despite a history of violent crimes against children. He had already violated his parole once. They also blame the police for not acting on a tip that could have saved Tazne in the hours after her disappearance.
The case was controversial. The minister of police spoke at Tazne’s funeral and admitted mistakes. “We abandoned this child,” he admitted, pointing to Tazne’s little white chest, trimmed with gold. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited Van Wyk’s home and promised meaningful action.
Nine months later, Tazne’s parents thought it was all lip service.
‘How many children have died after Tazne? Kidnapped? Murdered? Still nothing is happening ”, said her mother, Carmen van Wyk.
She doesn’t shed tears. Instead, anger bubbles up in her and her community. Homes associated with the suspect and his relatives were set on fire after Tazne’s murder.
It’s not just up to the police to stop the abuse, said Marc Hardwick, who was a police officer for 15 years, 10 of them as a detective in a child protection unit.
He recalls one case from 20 years ago. A 6-year-old girl was beaten to death by her father for watching cartoons and, distracted as any 6-year-old would be, did not listen to him.
When they arrested the father and took him – he was later sentenced to life in prison – the victim’s nine-year-old cousin approached Hardwick and said, “I think you stopped my bad dreams today.”
Clearly, children in that household had gone through a nightmare and the other adults had kept quiet, Hardwick said, “The reality is that child abuse is not a topic people want to talk about.”