Pretoria - The Department of Basic Education has come under fire for allowing two minor rape victims to return to the same school as their alleged assailants.
Stakeholders and commentators on Tuesday blamed the department for breaking all codes of children’s rights and subjecting them to further trauma.
They accused the department of failing the girls by denying them their rights to protection, initially by delaying reporting the incident to the police, and then by denying them the right to safety at school.
Saying the Constitution stipulated that the best interests of the child were of paramount importance, Save The Children Fund’s Canny Geyer said: “This is a direct dereliction of duty by the state, and by do doing this they have again violated the rights of the children.”
He said: “How can the children be taken back into the place where they experienced the most awful thing that can happen to a woman.”
Emotional abuse was being perpetuated by the department, he said.
“I just want to cry when I hear this; their childhood has been taken away from them, then somebody has the audacity to say they have no money to transport them to another school,” he said. All excuses fell by the wayside when the rights of a child had to be protected.
Three girls, aged between 7 and 9, were allegedly raped by two older schoolboys on the grounds of Kutumela Molefi Primary School at the Lethabong informal settlement east of Pretoria in June.
The incident went unreported for three weeks which was when the father of one of the girls discovered that the principal had not reported it.
The department this week said it had no means of transporting the children to other schools.
Child protection organisation, the Teddy Bear Clinic’s Dr Shaheda Omar explained that putting the girls back into the an environment in which the boys remained, would cause irreparable damage.
She said: “That should not even have crossed the minds of those planning intervention. Coming into contact furthers the victimisation of the children and feeds into their fears.
“They face the real danger of suffering severe post traumatic stress, victimisation, secondary trauma and flashbacks to the incident. These poor girls require specialised therapy and psycho-social support as opposed to generic counselling,” she said.
The children needed someone skilled for which the department should have outsourced to other departments or organisations who dealt specifically in cases of this nature.
DA provincial spokesman for education, Khume Ramulifho, also questioned why the boys had not been suspended pending the investigation into the matter.
”It is a measure of our society, how we respond to our most vulnerable groups in times of such brutality,” he said, adding that the victims, their families and the greater community of Lethabong needed to know that everything would be done to help them through this trauma.
He said the DA would approach both Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi and Social Development’s Faith Mazibuko to ensure that the right thing was done.
“We will also approach Mazibuko to have all three victims enrolled immediately in victim support programmes,” he said.
The Education Department failed to respond to questions on its course of action and the accusations that it had failed the girls.