A lot of the focus on children during the Covid-19 crisis has related to accessing meals and education. But children may be facing other harms during this time, writes Koketso Moeti.
This means that children have not been to school and were initially even prohibited from moving between households – a regulation which was later amended.
While not all the incidents of maltreatment experienced by children happened at home, it still shows that home is unfortunately not a safe place for many children in the country. While a range of resources, including WhatsApp and call back services, have been made available for victims of violence, the underlying assumption with most of them is that the victim is an adult with access to a mobile device – which is not the case for most children. There are few places these children can turn to for support.
Child care organisation Unicef South Africa has warned that this puts them at increased risk of harm online. This has been a global problem during lockdowns, such as in London where police warned about the online harm of children, after indecent images of 92 children were found online within a month of their lockdown.
But over and above that, the government should be scaling up social protection measures to mitigate the social and economic impacts of the outbreak on children.
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