Thomas Siebert shifts uncomfortably on the wooden court bench and flinches occasionally at the testimony of the man who sodomised and then strangled his six-year-old son to death 18 months ago.
He tries to avoid staring at the 48-year-old killer, Theunis Olivier, instead peering around the courtroom and making occasional notes.
But Siebert’s emotion is apparent when he addresses reporters on the steps of the Cape High Court, expressing the wish that Olivier, convicted of kidnapping, indecent assault and murder, be removed from society for good.
”The only possible outcome can be life [imprisonment],” he said on the sidelines of pre-sentencing proceedings last week. ”By law the maximum is life. That is all that there is.”
Siebert is among a growing body of parents whose children are kidnapped, raped and murdered in South Africa every year.
Activist body Missing Children South Africa says about 2 000 children are killed in the country annually. Just under 1 000 are currently listed as missing.
Siebert swallows hard when describing the 18 months since his son, Steven, went missing just before Christmas 2005, while on holiday with his parents in Plettenberg Bay in the Western Cape province.
His body was found hidden in bushes near the home of Olivier, a Zimbabwean-born handyman who has confessed to abusing a number of children over several years.
He had spent 15 years in Zimbabwean jail for child molestation.
How is the Siebert family getting on with their lives? ”We’re not,” says the boy’s father.
”We’re just trying to deal with it day by day. This is the first step to try and get it behind us,” he says, gesturing toward the courtroom.
Opposition political parties and activist groups have been urging the government to step up measures to contain such crimes and community members protesting at court cases have called for the return of the death penalty.
”[There is] a serious moral corrosion within our communities and society,” the Inkatha Freedom Party’s Patricia Lebenya said recently.
”Our children are not safe anymore and government has not done enough to create safer environments.”
Ann Skelton of the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Child Law said prevention was part of the answer.
A breakdown in family cohesion, fuelled by poverty and alcohol abuse, was leaving children vulnerable to predators, she said.
She proposed that government resources be pumped into a mass deployment of fieldworkers to monitor children at home and school and make sure that failing parents get special training and rehabilitation.
”It is a developmental process,” said Skelton.
Newspapers have been carrying stories almost daily about children falling prey to violent criminals in recent months.
They include Sheldean Human (7) from Pretoria, who was raped and murdered in February, and Mikayla Rossouw (6) of Swellendam in the Western Cape who was found dead in the backyard shack of a neighbour’s house in June.
The body of Sonja Brown (2) from Rawsonville in the Western Cape, was found in a sewerage manhole last month, and Anastacia Wiese (11) was found dead in the ceiling of her mother’s home in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town, in March.
Eight-year-old Refilwe Ringane’s body was discovered in a field in Modimolle in the northern Limpopo province in June, while an 11-year-old girl from Bishop Lavis in the Western Cape gave birth to a baby last month after being raped, allegedly by a neighbour.
Arrests have been made in most cases, but the families’ wounds are slow to heal.
”There is no way to understand the grief and the anguish a family goes through,” said Vernon Norton (47) whose six-month-old granddaughter, Jordan Leigh Norton, was murdered in June 2005.
At court last week to support the Siebert family, said Norton: ”I came to hear first-hand that the justice system is able to rid our society of such evil people.
”It is difficult to understand how a human being supposed to show some compassion towards children and protect children is able to commit such a crime.” – Sapa-AFP