The United Nations established World Children’s Day on November 20, 1954 to promote the well-being of children around the world.
On November 20, 1959, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and in 1989 it adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Many children have benefited from these instruments, but millions of children are still trapped in child labour and die early deaths due to malnutrition, violence or childhood diseases.
As a child who grew up in foster care and as an adult who, in later life, managed organisations that provided statutory childcare, I have seen how broken the system is.
Of real concern is the lack of alternative pathways for children in need of care. If, as a child, you are in trouble with the law, the court will place you in one of the state’s secure care facilities.
The government’s Minimum Norms and Standards for Secure Care Facilities in South Africa lays out a bold vision of what secure care ought to be and what it should offer children in conflict with the law, but these “child prisons” are known in practice to serve as holding facilities for children until they are adults to be transferred to adult prisons.
Evidence of any child exiting the State’s Secure Care facilities restored to civil society and not pushed deeper into the criminal justice system is virtually nil.
And the costs are astronomical. The State spends more than R30 000 per month on each child in their facilities, with a very low success rate.
But the bulk of the childcare residential services are provided by private agencies, mostly NGOs. These “children’s homes” are subsidised by the State at a rate well below what the State itself spends on children in its own care.
While the State spends more than R30 000 per month per child on providing basic standards of care for children in its facilities, it only provides a grant of less than R4 000 per month per child to private “children’s homes”, while insisting they provide world class levels of care.
These private agencies depend on donor funding and are often at the mercy of Department of Social Development (DSD) officials who interrogate them for not providing services at the standard levels of care, but do nothing to provide the funding to enable such care. The state is acting like the very parents who have caused their children to end up in childcare facilities. They blame the institution in the same way dysfunctional parents blame their children.
The other inconsistency is the children’s court and childcare system. When courts refer a child in need of care to a facility, DSD contacts a private agency to care for that child. They place the child in the care of one of the children’s homes, run by an NGO.
The problem is: the child is placed in the care of the children’s home and that home must provide care for the child based on the minimum norms and standards of the Children’s Act, but the courts fail to order DSD to pay the full cost of the care.
The courts allow the state to continue to pay a fee way below the monthly cost of care for the child, but demand that the agency provide complete care as per the court order.
If the agency doesn’t provide such care, it can be shut down. This essentially means the court orders that a private agency pay for the full cost of child care that the state should provide.
It is time childcare agencies say no to placements from the courts unless the court order compels the state to pay for the full cost of the child’s care.
* Lorenzo A Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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