Nine young girls have been found dead around South Africa in the past seven months after they had been reported missing. The nine comprise the most widely publicised cases.
The most recent find was the decomposed body of Elizabeth Martin (13), found in a water tank at a farm in Leeu-Gamka in the Western Cape.
Martin was reported missing on April 14, after her father, a farmworker, asked his employer to drop her off at her mother’s home in Merweville.
On July 2, the body of two-year-old Sonjia Brown was found in a manhole near her Rawsonville home. The girl was found dead three days after she was reported missing.
Nine days before, on June 23, the body of six-year-old Mikayla Rossouw was found in a box under a bed in the backyard shack of a neighbour’s house in Swellendam. Rossouw was last seen alive on June 10, when she had been playing with friends.
Eight-year-old Refilwe Ringane’s decomposed body was found in a field in Modimolle, Limpopo, on June 17. She was reported missing on June 12 after she was sent to a shop by her brother.
Also in Modimolle, the body of another eight-year-old was found a month earlier, on April 13. The girl was found strangled in bushes after she was reported missing the day before. She and a six-year-old neighbour were confronted by an unknown man en route to her uncle’s home in Flora Park. The younger child managed to escape, but the older girl was kidnapped.
The body of an eight-year-old girl was found in a field at Breipaal near Douglas in the Northern Cape on April 4, three days after she went missing — she had been hit with a blunt object. The girl had been sent to buy groceries by her parents and did not return home on April 1.
On March 12, the body of six-year-old Naledi Ndebele was found wrapped in sheep skin under a bush in Brandfort in the Free State. Ndebele was reported missing by her grandmother the day before her body was found, when she did not return from playing at a neighbour’s home.
The body of Anastacia Wiese (11) was found at her mother’s Mitchells Plain home on March 11 after she had been reported missing two days earlier.
On January 10, the body of Londi Mdunge (10) was found after she had been raped and apparently thrown off a cliff in Durban’s Molweni area. Mdunge’s mutilated body was found at the foot of a cliff overlooking the Inanda Dam the day after she was reported missing. She had been collecting mangos with her cousin when she disappeared.
Miranda Friedman from Men and Women against Child Abuse on Saturday said the abductions and murders of the girls are ”incredibly worrying”. She added that crimes against children go largely under-reported.
”It is an incredibly worrying trend we are seeing in the number of girls being raped,” she said, adding that parents across the country are likely ”terrified” that such crimes can be committed against their children. — Sapa