- A year after establishing a specialised unit to combat domestic violence and child abuse, Swaziland is claiming to have reduced crimes against children by a third.
At the launch of the first annual report by the Royal Swaziland Police Force's Domestic Violence and Child Protection Unit, Leckinah Magagula, head of the unit, told IRIN: "Last year, we recorded three abuse offences committed against children every day. This year, on average and nationally, two child-abuse offences were recorded each day. This is a diminishment by one-third, and it is an achievement."
When the unit commenced operations, an average of three children were raped every day. According to UNAIDS, about 33 percent of the sexually active adult population is infected with HIV, the highest incidence in the world.
The unit's annual report cites cultural beliefs as contributing to the underreporting of child abuse cases. "The rate of reporting has increased, but there is a cultural conflict, which can hinder reporting. This is a reluctance to reveal 'tibi tendlu' [SiSwati for 'the rubbish of the house'] to the outside world."
Crime statistics used to be compiled by individual child welfare NGOs in their area of operation, but this year's statistics were gathered by the police unit in concert with the nongovernmental organisation, Save the Children, based in the capital, Mbabane.
The apparent success in reducing child abuse cases in a population of about one million people is also seen as being rooted in a 2004 campaign launched by the United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF), called Lihlombe Lekukhalela, SiSwati for 'a shoulder to cry on'. The initiative educated daycare workers and teachers of orphans and vulnerable children at neighbourhood care points to recognise the warning signs that a child was being abused.
This led to interventions in several reported incidents, where children were removed from abusive situations and perpetrators brought to book in "child-friendly courts" set up in the Lubombo, Shiselweni and Manzini Regions, which credited Save the Children for facilitating the child abuse convictions.
A Save the Children report on crimes against children was released at the same time as the police report, but interpretation of the statistics differed.
The unit's office in the southern Shiselweni and eastern Lubombo Regions, the most impoverished and underdeveloped of Swaziland's four regions, issued a statement, widely reported in the local media, that the publicity given to gay Swazis and same-sex relations had led to an increase in same-sex child offence cases.
Save the Children's offices in the central Manzini Region, Swaziland's most populous area, disputed this assertion. "Gays or lesbians have not committed the cases of sodomy that we have seen, but instead it is people who used their power over the children, such as relatives and teachers, to derive pleasure from such acts."
The unit's Magagula also blamed sexually explicit television programmes for motivating sex crimes by children against other children. "The country's media has a responsibility to ensure that children are not exposed to such programmes," he said.
Save the Children offered a contrary view to Magagula: "Sexually explicit television and media programmes had not had much effect on the incidents of sexual offences committed against children by children. Such cases also come from rural or remote areas, where the children don't even have access to TV, or any form of media."
The unit, which is also instituting sign language instruction for its personnel to communicate with deaf children, said it had realised in its first year of operations that the holiday season made children particularly vulnerable to abuse.
"School holidays, especially, are dangerous, because children are sometimes tasked by their mothers with fetching money from fathers who are working in far parts of the country," Magagula said. "Children should not be sent alone during odd hours or for long distances, as this makes them vulnerable to abuse, sometimes from their fathers."
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