Special Hearings — Children's Hearings — 1997-05-22

MR POLONGWANA: Extent.  The extent of violations was vast.  They extended from psychological and physical harming of the bodies of many a young person;  to intrusion into the sanctuary of the home;  to the destruction of community space.  The violations profoundly affected individual lives, family institutions and community cohesion so that many of the young were left bereft.
 Let us look briefly at the statistics of the numbers of children and youth affected between 1960 and 1994, drawing on available figures for those under 18.
 The statistics on how many of the young were involved in conflict are not available.  No liberation organisation can give accurate lists of the membership of children and youth.  Prison figures are not broken down into categories and the number of young who were imprisoned across the country cannot be accurately calculated.  Nor are there figures on the length of imprisonment of they young, the conditions under which they were held, nor even the Act under which they were held.  Government statistics on detention tell little more.  Under the previous Government a series of ruses and careful disguises were used to obscure the truth even when Parliamentary replies were given to direct questions.
 Published writings give numbers of young who were detained and their data is available, but the figures vary and the sources are not always given.  For the year 1986, for example, published figures on the number of those 18 years of age who were detained vary from 300 to 2677 to 4000 to 8800.  An often quoted figure exists for the period 1985 to 1989 of 24000 young held in detention.  The African National Congress in their submission before the TRC states that 15000 children had been detained out of a total of 80000 detainees during the period under investigation.  
 Individual case history of gross violations numbering from half to a million cases were on file even before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began to gather evidence.  It is not known how many of these cases are to do with the young.  The major point here is that if we do not even know how many of the young joined liberation movements, were politically active, were trained in exile and sent to fight, were detained, or were seriously harmed, then it is difficult to record the truth of that which the young did and that which was done to them.  Without accurate records, what will historians say of the part they played and what cost?  
 Without knowing how many of the young were closely engaged in the conflict;  without knowing how many were detained and possibly severely ill-treated;  without hearing stories of the young, how can we ensure that their concerns lay claim to society's attention and that their pain is acknowledged and attended to?
 Attempts need to be made to discover whose pain is being silenced and why.  For example, that of white conscripts into the army and very young female activists.  Recording the truth necessitates descriptions of sets of systematic violations across time not only the accounting of extreme violence committed on the bodies of some of the young.  Hence he call by the TRC for those who were young when abused to give accounts of their experiences.  The Commissioners recognise that there are a number of reasons why some of the young, especially committed political activists, have not given statements, but they are invited to document their stories so as to ensure the accuracy of historical accounts and to draw the nation's attention to the contributions made and costs incurred by children and youth in shaping a new social dispensation.

MS KWASHANE: Antecedents.  The Act calls for a description of the antecedents of (the things that led up to) gross human rights violations.  The outline of the causes, nature and extent of abuses given above demands a serious reconsideration of the place South African society has allotted to children and youth.  It asks for a social, political, economic and moral accounting for the treatment of the young in the past and for an investigation of how that treatment informs the values and respect accorded to them now.  There is ample evidence that the abuses committed on children and youth reflected the regard in which they were held.  The young, particularly those who were rendered unimportant by their colour, were not worthy of rights or respect?  If we do not attempt to understand the forces that permitted, and continue to permit the abuse of the young, we can make little progress in creating a society that accord them respect.
 Those behind the invention and management of apartheid policy bear a major responsibility for the statutory violation of children.  
 They caused definitions of difference based on race and ethnicity to be institutionalised.  From its law of origin, the Population Registration Act of 1950, arose the banal, cruel technologies of racial classification that were necessary to give force to all the other regulations and Acts that normalised the destruction of key aspects of life which are central to children's healthy emotional and physical development. 
 Those in Government, with the support of their followers, created categories of "other", persons who could become identified as the enemy, and whose human rights were, therefore, more easily violated and, of course, the children of the "other" were seen to have as few rights or as little need for respect or protection as their parents.  This rendered acceptable the systematic use of violence against them - both in the form of discriminatory language and physical violence.  
 In reinforcing the notion that these "other" children and youth did not warrant great concern, those in power sought to render their protest and their pain illegitimate.  It is not these forces alone which we need to understand.  Ideologies of the child, the family and of patriarchy, were harnessed as well in determining the manner in which the adults in our society constructed and still construct their relationships towards children.
 The treatment of the young tells us much about adult behaviour:  about cruelty, abuse of power, willingness to commit excesses and flout norms, and the ease with which the young were denied their humanity.  
 It tells us about the uses and abuses of childhood that are sanctioned by society.  These include the forms and force of authority held as ideal and embedded in institutions, for example, in patriarchal forms of family control and physical punishment in the home and educational institutions.  Also included are social norms to do with the social control of childhood that can impede or encourage the granting of rights to children.  Children's rights are not free goods:  they have to be wrested from societies where investments in patterns of childhood contradicts the interest of children, for example, in militarising them when still at school and conscripting them as soldiers.  South African childhoods at home and in the communities, have been characterised for many years by regimes of fear and abuse operating in the name of respect for adult power.  
 It should therefore not have come as a surprise when the security forces used sjamboks to beat children and youth off the streets and back to school during times of protest.  Children had no right, after all, to defy the law of the adult.  The same is true of the Trojan Horse episode.  Indeed as we go into the future, it is these practices which will need to be understood and addressed by all who claim to place the interests of the young first.  It is normative constructions of the power relations between adults and children which will continue to make possible the violent abuse of the young by adults.