Towards making homes safer and parents resilient to prevent filicide: assessing availability of preventive multi-sectoral services in South Africa: desktop study report

Abstract

South Africa has an overall child homicide rate of 5.5 per 100 000 of the population; with a distinct gender pattern of younger girls being murdered and an increase in male homicide during adolescence. The South African Police Service (SAPS) annual crime statistics for 2019/2020 showed that, 943 children were killed in 2020 and 352 children were killed between October to December of 2020. Despite these alarming statistics and deserved coverage by the media, South Africa has no strategy to systematically tackle the underlying and intertwined contextual factors that affect child survival such as patriarchy, gender inequality and discrimination, poverty, high rates of single parenthood and lack of social support for parents, unemployment, child living arrangements, and structural violence. There is an intriguing phenomenon relating to interconnectedness of VAW and VAC; where mothers and children are victims of family violence on the one hand, and women's perpetration of VAC on the other. While there is a growing focus on initiatives that seek to understand measures for prevention and response to VAC among various stakeholders for example the Violence Prevention Forum (VPF) initiative; there is a knowledge gap in the provision of services to parents and caregivers in response to severe VAC outcomes such as filicide (deliberate killing of children by their own parents). It is less frequently recognised that parents may be a threat to the human security of their children; and discourses in child protection policies and interventions are dominated by efforts to build healthy parent-child attachments and strengthen parental capacity to care for children, to reduce VAC in the form of neglect, abuse and exploitation. Filicide is the most serious form of violence against children. Filicide occurs under various circumstances which differ from those associated with child homicides including child maltreatment (abuse and neglect), abandonment of very young children or infanticide. The understanding of vulnerabilities of children and response to contextual factors driving parents to kill their children, especially during family adversity, remain a gap. In the absence of interventions specifically designed to prevent filicide, it continues unabated.