October 2013 has found us with a barrage of media
highlighting the loss of innocence in South Africa. There has been the
conviction of a couple for the rape and murder of their baby “Samantha”,
children raped and murdered by a community member and left in a public toilet,
a mother who allegedly poisoned her children and herself and her children and
multiple abandonments with the intention that children die and many did die.
These are the cases the media know about. We also met with students from
Forensic pathology who highlighted that there are between 300 and 500 unnatural
baby deaths in the Johannesburg mortuary per year and only 10% of those are
investigable!
We live in a society where we acknowledge that we are a
“throw away culture” and we are literally “throwing away babies”. If we are
unable to afford children their first right ie the right to life, what of their
other rights? We bring children into a world where on arrival their arrival
they are not wanted and often hated, used, hurt or murdered.
If I we say this is a loss of innocence, there is the loss of
the actual innocent child but there is also the loss of the innocence of our
society at large. We, like a baby, look at the world with hope and wonder and
see a future. We bring children into a world where we want to share the joy of
what life can be. We see the media and shudder, what we have done?
For those who hurt and kill babies, and as a result
the
innocence of our society, we as a society must have killed their humanity when
they were children. To be human is to be cared for so we can care. If we
murder, we must be dead inside. We, as a society raised these murderers we are
so enraged by. We see communities respond decisively with rage at the death of
innocence and these acts of commission are deserving of rageful condemnation.
What we seem to be missing is that it appears that the acts of omission, or the
neglect of childhood, results in a adults who are capable of the destruction of
innocence in rage or in total absence of any emotion, the latter being the more
terrifying.
How do you teach the uncared for to care?
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