At night, Amanda Zitho worries that her little boy is shivering and cold in his coffin, and yearns to bring him a blanket.
She knows that Wandi is dead and gone, and that it is senseless, but that does not stop the ache. Wandi was five years old when he was killed in April, allegedly strangled with a rope by a Johannesburg neighbor — another dead child in a land where there are too many.
According to official figures, about 1,000 children are murdered every year in South Africa, nearly three a day.
However, that statistic, horrific as it is, might be an undercount.
University of Cape Town Children’s Institute director Shanaaz Mathews thinks that many more children are victims of homicides that are not investigated properly, not prosecuted or completely missed by authorities.
The official figures are “just the tip of the iceberg,” said Mathews, who is probably the country’s leading expert on child homicides.
In a country where more than 50 people are murdered every day, children are not special and 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 uncover the real extent of those child deaths. She did it by getting forensic pathologists to put the dead bodies of hundreds of newborn babies, infants, toddlers and teenagers on examination tables to determine exactly how they died.
Child death reviews are common in developed countries, but had never been done in South Africa before Mathews’ project. As she feared, the findings were grim.
Over one year, the pathologists examined the corpses of 711 children at two mortuaries in Cape Town and Durban, and concluded that more than 15 percent of them died as a result of homicides.
For context, the UK’s official child death review last year found that 1 percent of its child deaths were homicides.
Mathews’ research showed that homicide was the second-most common cause of death for children in those two precincts.
“The numbers are not going down,” she said. “If anything, they are going up.”
There are two patterns in South Africa. Teenagers are being swallowed up in the country’s desperately high rate of violent street crime.
However, large numbers of children aged five and younger are victims of deadly violence meted out not by an offender with a gun or a knife on a street corner, but by mothers and fathers, relatives and friends, in kitchens and living rooms, around dinner tables and in front of TVs.
Fatal child abuse is where the South African justice system often fails, and cases are “falling through the cracks,” Mathews said.
There was the case of a nine-month-old child who had seizures after being dropped off at a daycare center, she said, adding that the toddler died despite being rushed to hospital.
Doctors found severe head injuries, and told the mother to go to the police, but no one followed up, Mathews said.
The mother never reported the death, and when investigators tried to revive the case nearly two years later, the baby had long been buried and the evidence was cold, Mathews said.
Joan van Niekerk, a child protection expert, recounts numerous cases tainted by police ineptitude and corruption.
“I sometimes go through stages when I am more angry with the system than I am with the perpetrators, and that’s not good,” she said.
Van Niekerk said that justice for children in South Africa is unacceptably “hard to achieve,” and failures of the justice system sometimes lead to more deaths.
The neighbor originally charged with killing Wandi Zitho was released and the case provisionally dropped because police did not deliver enough evidence, possibly because of 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.
Tazne was eight years old when her body was found in February, dumped in a drain near a highway nearly two weeks after she disappeared.
She had been abducted, raped and murdered, police said.
Tazne’s parents blame the correctional system for paroling the man charged with their daughter’s murder despite a history of violent offenses against children. He had already violated his parole once.
They also fault police for failing to act on a tip that might have saved Tazne in the hours after her disappearance.
The case was high-profile. The South African minister of police spoke at Tazne’s funeral and admitted errors.
“We have failed this child,” he conceded, pointing at Tazne’s small white coffin, trimmed in gold.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the Van Wyk home and promised meaningful action.
Nine months later, Tazne’s parents feel that it was all lip service.
“How many children after Tazne have already passed away? Have been kidnapped? Have been murdered? Still nothing is happening,” said her mother, Carmen van Wyk.
She sheds no tears. Instead, anger bubbles inside her and her community. Houses connected with the suspect and members of his family were set on fire in the wake of Tazne’s killing.
It is not just on 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, in which a six-year-old girl was beaten to death by her father because she was watching cartoons and, distracted as any six-year-old would be, was not listening to him, Hardwick said.
When they arrested the father and took him away — he was later sentenced to life in prison — the victim’s nine-year-old cousin approached the police officer and said: I think you stopped my bad dreams today,” Hardwick said.
Clearly, children in that household had been living a nightmare, and the other adults had remained silent, he said.
“The reality is that child abuse is not a topic people want to talk about,” Hardwick added.
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