Special Hearings — Children's Hearings — 1997-06-12

MS COLEMAN: I don't have names.  What I am saying to you is that if you are a Managing Director of a company and you know that there has been an organised onslaught onto a department, something went wrong, there was fraud through organisation or something within your company, you are going to make it your business to find out what happened.
 If you are sitting on the State Security Council, you must know what is happening in your country and there could never, and believe me, I was there, there could never have been an operation of that nature that wasn't highly organised.

MR MALAN: That is appreciated, I think we share that.  The question is still the distinction between kind of political accountability and moral accountability and the real criminal culpability in terms of the seed of the conspiracy that was really the nature of the communication, but thank you very much.  I think you've clarified that for me too.

MS MKHIZE: Piet Meiring?

PROF MEIRING: Ms Coleman, thank you for your submission.  I just want to know during the difficult times when so many horrible things happened to children, what counselling services were available to them and to the parents and added to that, are there sufficient counselling services available today because it is an ongoing problem.

MS COLEMAN: Yes.  The Detainee Parents' Support Committee had a very good panel of Doctors and we have a very good panel of Counsellors.  In the main it was just gratis, they didn't earn money for being on those panels, and they used to debrief us.
 When they came into the Detainee Office, they were debriefed, they were then taken, referred to the Counselling Service etc.  Unfortunately a lot of the children might have gone for their first appointment, but didn't necessarily follow up so much because first of all it was costly to get transport, second of all a lot of them were damaged psychologically damaged, and they did not necessarily see the reason why they should go for counselling.
 They didn't necessarily have the energy to do it, to make the effort, but we had it there, it was there for them.  As far as availability you said for now, that was what I was asking for.  I don't believe we are addressing the real trauma that has occurred in this country.
 And that we should be setting up trauma counselling services that are really accessible to people in the townships in particular.  So that they can go for counselling and I also believe that the teachers need to be aware of a disturbed child, because they can pick it up, but if they don't have a service also, but they need to be trained, it is a training.  Does that answer you?

PROF MEIRING: Thank you so much.

MS MKHIZE: Joyce Seroke?

MS SEROKE: Audrey, it has been repeatedly said that parents abdicated their role and their responsibility to such an extent that children found themselves being agents of change.  Now through your experience in the Detainees Parents' Committee, what were the reasons and did you ever try to find out from parents if at all, if they did abdicate, why they did so and to the detriment of the children?

MS COLEMAN: That is a hard question.  I think that first of all the parents were very tied up with their daily living, with trying to make a living.
 I think the children had far more courage and therefore they were able and they were freer to work.  I personally in the Detainee office, saw the parents, the mothers absolutely distraught trying to find children or trying to parent and not being able to.  They didn't have access to their children in prisons and in the townships itself, I would say that the difficulty for parents was that life is hard and they were basically having to administer to their needs.
 I would say children are freer and were able to go out and take the political leadership, if that is what you are talking about.  But as far as being interested in their children in detention, I never found a parent that wasn't very supportive of their children.  They might not have agreed with their political ideology either.

MS SEROKE: I say this because throughout my experience, I found that the parents especially the mothers, were the ones who would go out of their way, going from prison to prison, looking for the children and giving up their jobs for that matter and so that is why I want us to really find out why people should say parents abdicated?

MS COLEMAN: I think they are talking more of maybe a political abdication, that the parents did not take up the thrust of opposition maybe, isn't that what they mean?
 Because we did find that the parents didn't necessarily agree with their childrens' political activity, but when it came to their problems of being detained, the parents were there for them.

MS MKHIZE: Dr Randera?

DR RANDERA: Audrey, I just want to ask one question and that is related to somewhere in your submission you talk about the work that you did with psychologists, lawyers, Doctors.  Now as I understand it, that refers to perhaps individuals and selected groups of people.
 I want to know what the response of organised professional bodies were to what was happening in the country in that period that you are looking at?

MS COLEMAN: You are touching a very sore point.  We made several representations to the MASA, the medical body.  We were totally dissatisfied with the role of the District Surgeons.  In many, many cases they saw torture and they never reported it, never did anything about it.
 One of the Doctors that I spoke to, said that he didn't put his neck out because he felt it was better to maybe help the child than say anything and get thrown out of the job.  I think he was trying to justify.
 I think the Wendy Orr stance was the right stance to take.  The lawyers in general were certainly I couldn't, we had such a vast panel of lawyers that I was perfectly satisfied with them.  But the medical profession I certainly found was appalling.  And also their response, you know, as a body to the approaches that were made, was not satisfactory.

DR RANDERA: And just a follow up.  I know it is your personal perspective, but why do you think these bodies were responding as they did?

MS COLEMAN: Well, it is why most of conservative society respond as they did.  I don't know if they felt threatened, whether they felt there is no smoke without fire.  I once spoke at a National Council of Women Day and I stood up and I started talking about what was happening.  I wanted them to know what was happening to children in this country.
 And a women in the front row, a very nice lady said, troublemakers.  And I immediately said to her, what makes a troublemaker?  Shouldn't we be looking at our society to see why our children are becoming troublemakers, what is the environment that they look at?  Why is criminality so high today, why is there so much rape and killing?
 And I think that that is something people in the Northern suburbs and in the conservative people, really didn't want to know.  It was too far away, it was over there.  I think they felt happier being that side.  And it wasn't a popular view any way.

DR RANDERA: Thank you.

MS MKHIZE: Tom Manthata?

THOMAS MANTHATA: I don't know whether I have not gone through this document.  What was DPC doing with the youth that was getting missing after being detained?  And according to your experience could your document still be available to us to help our investigative unit with regards to those youth who are missing or who went missing?