Johannesburg - More children are being abandoned every year but fewer are being adopted.
Their mothers are viewed as “sad, bad, mad” women, and those children struggle to get loving homes because of societal taboos over adoption.
“They are our trash-can kids and it’s devastating. We shouldn’t be talking about them like that – they should be our angels,” says anthropologist Dee Blackie.
Blackie describes the challenge as “high levels of child abandonment and low levels of adoption, coupled with conflicting cultural perceptions of these practices”, which underlined the need for a better understanding of the social context that created the situation.
Blackie has just finished a master’s thesis on child abandonment and adoption in the context of African ancestral beliefs. She is a consultant to the National Adoption Coalition SA, and her research report was released recently.
She interviewed young women who had unplanned pregnancies, women who abandoned their children, community members, police officers, nurses and social workers, baby home managers and caregivers, adoption social workers, foster and adoptive parents, psychologists and psychiatrists, legal experts, traditional healers and abandoned children. Her work was mainly in Alexandra, Soweto and Tembisa.
“Predominantly we aren’t taking care of our young women,” says Blackie.
Those young women are increasingly abandoning their vulnerable babies and children, and doing it predominantly in unsafe places like rubbish bins, toilets and the veld. Those children are the survivors – only 60 of every 200 abandoned survive – but they face a grim future.
There aren’t enough children’s homes and there are still strong cultural barriers to adoption, particularly fear of disapproval by a family’s ancestors. Many abandoners were desperate women who had been raped or abandoned themselves when they became pregnant.
“None could tell me why they had abandoned their children, but all appeared extremely disconnected from their child at the time of the abandonment, and believed themselves and their children to be at the mercy of fate. None saw themselves as perpetrators of child abandonment, but rather as victims of their particular situation, making them feel disempowered, angry and depressed,” Blackie adds.
The law often hinders rather than facilitates adoptions, she says. “It is tantamount to abuse.”
It’s illegal for girls under 18 to hand over unwanted babies for adoption without a guardian’s consent, thus encouraging abandonment; anonymous child abandonment is criminalised; and “baby safes” (for safe, anonymous abandonments) are illegal.
“Illegal immigrants are unable to legally place their children in the formal child protection system in South Africa, and face deportation should they try,” Blackie notes.
Some abandoned babies end up effectively being trafficked, police asking finders if they want to keep them, or babies informally handed to people who have lost a child.
Blackie speaks of desperate young women who see no option other than abandonment, of abandoned babies who may grow into traumatised and alienated adults with no idea of their background, and of officials who discourage women who try to find safe ways of abandoning their babies, which then drives them into unsafe abandonments.
“Adoption social workers see abandoning mothers as victims of poverty and structural violence which has stripped them of their ability to love their child, and that the choice to abandon is often a ‘survival strategy’.”
Psychiatrists and psychologists advocate solving the problem through treatment of the individual patient, while sangomas believe in healing the collective family.
Sangomas recommend consulting the ancestors for guidance and introducing the child to their new family’s ancestors from the start, she says.
Lizo Tom’s story
Lizo Tom doesn’t know who cared for him until he was three years old.
He doesn’t know why his birth mother abandoned him in a hospital in Port Elizabeth and went home to tell her family he had died. But that rocky start has turned him into someone determined to help others.
“I need to make a difference,” said Tom.
“I’m at peace with what I was or what I’ve been through.”
Tom is now 29 and the corporate fundraiser for the SOS Children’s Villages, based in Mamelodi.
He grew up in the SOS Children’s Villages, although he’s still not sure how he got there.
He’s found out he was born prematurely in a Port Elizabeth hospital, abandoned there, then taken in by an unknown carer until he was three, when he was sent to Pretoria and the SOS villages.
“That part of my life is still a mystery today,” he said.
“The only thing I had was a hospital card.”
That card listed a Lydia Johnson as his mother, with a PE address.
Years later as a teenager, Tom found a police constable who went in search of that address, and found a shebeen and then a shebeen queen who vaguely remembered a woman going into labour at the shebeen years earlier and being picked up by an ambulance.
Further digging found Johnson, who was shocked to meet Tom as she’d believed him to be dead. He never got a clear explanation for what happened.
“She’s passed on and I still don’t know why. No one even apologised,” he said.
Both Johnson and the man believed to be Tom’s father are now dead, and he has erratic contact with his surviving siblings from that family. He refers to those he grew up with in the SOS village as his siblings and talks of how many have repeated that difficult cycle of poverty.
But his own life is on track, partly through his love of singing which has taken him on tours around the world.
“Today I’m a proud father and a proud husband. It is scary, because I don’t know how to be a father,” he said.
But he’s clear on the need to help other children who’ve had a similar start.
On the front of Tom’s business card is the reminder of “A loving home for every child”, and on the back is a fundraising appeal to SMS the word “SOS” to 42975 to donate R30.
South Africa’s shame
* More than 3 500 babies were abandoned in 2010 (these are only the ones whom Child Welfare knows about).
* There are 18.5 million children in South Africa but 4.5 million of them live without either parent.
* About 150 000 children live in 79 000 child-headed households, more than 13 000 children live in residential facilities and 10 000 children live on the street.
* Last year, there were more than 11 million children registered for child support grants and more than half a million on foster care grants.
* Last November, the Registry of Adoptable Children and Parents logged 297 unmatched parents and 428 unmatched children who needed adopting; after sorting through the list it emerged that there were only 29 possible parents for those children.
* Only 1 699 adoptions took place last year, compared with 2 840 in 2004.
Where babies are dumped
* About 65 percent of abandoned children are newborn babies, with more than 90 percent younger than a year.
* Media reports indicated that 70 percent were found in unsafe places, with a fifth found in toilets, drains, sewers or gutters, and others abandoned in places including rubbish sites, dustbins, open ground, some abandoned in “baby safes” and hospitals, and others on the street, left with a relative or stranger, or left at a school or creche.
The Star