Pretoria - The Children’s Institute has received permission to join the application by the Centre for Child Law in which it is challenging the “lenient” punishment by the SA Council for Educators (Sace) for two teachers who hit pupils.
The Children’s Institute is joining the proceedings, which will be heard on April 25 in the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, as a friend of the court.
The application concerns the “shockingly lenient” sanctions which Sace applied to educators who were found guilty of assaulting school children.
The two unrelated cases related to the assault of a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old.
In the first case, a Gauteng boy in Grade 2 was hit on the back of his head with a PVC pipe by his teacher in 2015.
He suffered head injuries which became infected and resulted in his hospitalisation.
In the second case in Limpopo in 2019, a 10-year-old girl in Grade 5 was slapped over the head and cheek by her teacher. She was left with bleeding ears and suffered ongoing complications as a result and had to repeat the year.
The parents of both learners have shared the fear their children felt in going back to school.
The Children’s Institute, represented by the Equal Education Law Centre, said children were by their nature vulnerable and had the right to be protected from harm. They will argue that children are also entitled to learn in a safe environment.
After finding the educators guilty, Sace imposed sentences according to their Mandatory Sanctions document. The sanctions imposed included the educators’ removal off the roll of educators, but this was suspended for 10 years.
In addition, the teachers received a fine of R15 000, of which R5 000 was suspended, leaving R10 000 payable over 12 months.
Both the Centre for Child Law and the Children’s Institute view this sanction as shockingly lenient and inadequate, especially in considering the injuries the children have suffered.
The suspended sentence regarding the educators’ removal from the roll allowed them to return to the classroom, as long as they were not found guilty of another such incident.
The Children’s Institute said these teachers were allowed to face the learners in their classrooms, without them (the teachers) having received any rehabilitation or training to address their violent behaviour.
The application by the Centre for Child Law is an attempt to address the handing down of lenient sanctions, and it will ask that Sace’s mandatory sanctions handbook be revised in order to give its committee the option to impose rehabilitative procedure, such as anger management training and non-violent techniques on how to discipline children.
The Children’s Institute will present evidence to the court on the lasting psychological effects of corporal punishment on children.
According to the institute, even the children who witnessed the punishment being meted out to their classmates were in many cases affected.
It said there was no excuse for assaulting children, as there were many different ways in which to discipline them.
The Centre for Child Law said despite the ban on corporal punishment, it was still rife at schools across the country.
The South African Schools Act banned the use of corporal punishment in 1996. In 2000 this was confirmed in the Christian Education case, but research showed that corporal punishment as a disciplinary measure remained prevalent across schools in South Africa.
The Statistics South Africa General Household Survey 2018 indicates that as many as a million learners reported that they experienced corporal punishment in that year.
Pretoria News