Cape Town - Seven children, some as young as 11, have been arrested in Cape Town on charges of rape and attempted murder in just two weeks, says Mayco member for safety and security JP Smith.
On November 4, the city’s Ghost Squad arrested six youngsters, four aged 11, in connection with the rape of a 29-year-old woman in Athlone.
Smith said it later emerged that 10 boys, aged between 11 and 15, had been involved in the attack.
“This horrific incident happened after nine in the morning. Those young boys were supposed to be in school. But more disturbing is the fact that they were bold enough to carry out this attack in the first place and in broad daylight to boot,” said Smith.
“This incident is symptomatic of a serious faultline in our society and highlights just how normalised violence against women has become. It also speaks to a lack of parenting and exposes just how much work is required to fix our social fabric,” he said.
On November 8, a 16-year-old boy was arrested on charges of attempted murder and reckless and negligent driving during a raid on illegal drag racers in Athlone.
Smith said he was arrested in Mowbray following a 20-minute chase in which he had tried to run over a traffic officer who instructed him to stop.
Looking at the problem of children involved in crime more generally, Western Cape Social Development MEC Albert Fritz said the number of minors imprisoned has more than doubled. He blamed a spike in gang violence.
Fritz said the provincial government’s Security High Care centres, which provide shelter for juveniles awaiting trial and those who have been sentenced, had seen a sharp increase in the last three months. Some of the eight youth centres in the province had seen numbers increase from 300 young people a month to 650, Fritz said.
The centres can, on average, take 650 people at a time.
The Justice and Correctional Services Department said there were 3 693 juvenile offenders in custody in the Western Cape.
Most, 1 825, were in custody for murder, attempted murder and assault, and 242 for sexual assault and rape.
Fritz said the perpetrators were getting younger, with boys of 11 arrested for rape or murder.
”It is a situation that could definitely be linked to the rise of gang activity. It has been linked to the initiation of these youngsters into gangs.
As the gang violence increases, the numbers at the centres also increase,” Fritz said.
He said most of the youths involved were from dysfunctional homes where there were no father figures, which gang bosses pounced on.
This was a “worrying trend”, Fritz said, adding that the provincial government had rolled out the Mass Participation, Opportunity and Access, Development and Growth initiative to try to address the problem.
Fritz said it was compulsory for the children at the centres to attend school. They also took part in sport and other extramural activities in the rehabilitation process. He said the safety and security directorate had a number of programmes focusing on youth at risk.
One of the projects – the Youth Cadet Programme – focused on instilling a sense of social responsibility in them and teaching them about respect for the law.
Arina Smit, clinical unit manager of the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Reintegration of Offenders (Nicro), said children in the country were exposed to high levels of trauma and violence.
Lashing out with aggression was their way of showing how they felt.
She said it was not necessarily a case of an increase, but that cases were more in the public eye or more were being reported than in the past.
“A lot of children live in homes where violence is a normality,” Smit said.
She said some of the country’s health-care facilities were not well equipped to immediately deal with instances of emotional trauma suffered by children.
For example, if children suffered traumatic assault, they were taken from their homes instead of the system dealing with the offender.
This caused secondary trauma for the child.
Smit said therapists had found that most teenagers who committed crimes had been through a traumatic, violent experience before the age of 10 that manifested into violent behaviour years later.
“It is this issue that we as a country should be really looking into,” she said.
Cape Times