Tracey Farren
A Cape Town photographer was robbed, stripped and left in the bush with a sock stuffed in his mouth in February.
A policeman rounded up the culprits on the same day and returned the man’s goods to him. Three of the suspects were below the age of 18 and this was their first brush with the law.
They pleaded guilty and went to prison to await their sentences. After three months in Pollsmoor, they acquired tattoos and a haunted look in their eyes.
The boys spoke loudly of their mission beforehand and their community knew exactly where they were likely to hide. They sold the photographer’s expensive equipment for a couple of hundred rand.
Don Pinnock, a criminologist who has greatly influenced the field of juvenile justice in South Africa, says that this unconcern about consequence defines teenage rites of initiation.
The act of trussing up the man among the Port Jackson trees can be equated with the first hunt in traditional societies. In his book Guns, Rituals and Rites of Passage Pinnock says that in the absence of rituals like Jewish barmitzvahs, Christian holy communions or Khoi trance dances, boys invent their own rituals to prove their manhood.
But, he writes: “There is a poignant sadness about this: young men cannot initiate each other. Things can go awfully wrong.”
In the context of poverty, racism, broken homes and drugs, Pinnock says gangs become the imagined communities of young men and women. In many cases, boys are left without fathers to guide them safely through what Pinnock describes as a time of “naive wildness” and excesses.
Irvin Kinnes, of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, grew up in Manenberg. He says many women are forcing their gangster husbands out and running the family solo. “Where do the men go? Of course back to the gangs.”
Like the teenage sufistas of Rio de Janeiro, who ride trains at breakneck speed, risking death by electrocution from overhead lines, South Africa’s young gangsters break their first bottleneck to smoke drugs, commit their first theft, even make their first kill to prove their worth.
Arrest and imprisonment become the perils of the hunt. South Africa’s young prisoners are assaulted, raped and tutored in crime. They come out of prison highly stigmatised and condemned to what Pinnock calls “eternal liminality”.
By October the Juvenile Justice Draft Bill is likely to become law. Diversion is a critical component of the Bill. Aiming to avoid the brutality of the prison system and the crippling effect of a criminal record, diversion demands that children acknowledge responsibility for their offence, understand its impact on their victims and learn life skills to equip them for a new lifestyle.
Diversion is already being practised by some prosecutors, who are prepared to withdraw charges for less serious offences on condition that the child offender attends a programme, such as rehabilitation organisation Nicro’s Youth Empowerment Scheme, pretrial community service, family group conferencing or The Journey.
The Journey includes a wilderness component based on rites of passage theory. Educo, the facilitators of the outdoors component, get children from backgrounds as diverse as Bishops Court and Bishop Lavis to re-experience their pain through storytelling and to challenge their inner resources in a tough physical setting.
Nicro hosts a welcoming ceremony with family and friends afterwards and follow-up includes the creation of “sacred ground,” a special meeting place where weekly support meetings can be held afterwards. A new agency called Big Brother Big Sister matches children with a volunteer who provides a positive role model and support for six months.
Since 1992 Nicro has, with the support of the Dutch government, doggedly slashed a path towards restorative justice for youths. Despite a steady increase in the number of children assigned to diversion, the number of young people detained while awaiting trial has not diminished.
The informal commitment of prosecutors and magistrates to community-based sentencing is not enough, says Lukas Muntingh, research director at Nicro.
Muntingh has just completed a study which shows that only 14% of children who are assigned to diversion offend again within 36 months. He warns that there is no accurate norm against which to measure such results.
Bare facts, however like the fact that the greatest number of people in South African prisons are below the age of 23, and that 91% offend within 10 years more than suggest that diversion works.
The organisation in which Pinnock is involved, Usiko, runs a nine- to 12-month programme. The first phase, says programme coordinator Nick Fine, involves self-definition. “These children have been living with trauma, to themselves or people close to them, and they need to get their stories out.”
Fine, who has had extensive experience in Britain and the United States, says that the chances of success are greater if you can “draw a circle” around the children in the community. But, he cautions, such programmes should never set themselves up as alternatives to gangs.
The Juvenile Justice Draft Bill provides for specialised children’s courts presided over by a magistrate with regional court status. Prosecutors will be trained at the Justice Training College in Pretoria, in which the United Nations Development Programme for Child Justice will have a hand.
The Bill visualises “one-stop” justice centres, such as the one in Port Elizabeth that houses all the necessary facilities to deal with children within the criminal justice system. Bloemfontein is in the process of establishing one and Jackie Gallinetti of the Community Law Centre at the University of the Western Cape says that Cape Town has “wanted one for a long time.”
University of Cape Town researchers have calculated a saving of R250-million if the Bill is implemented.