In celebrating Human Rights Day on Friday, we reflect on considerable progress made regarding children’s rights in the past year.
The Children’s Amendment Bill is anticipated to be signed by the president soon and will provide, together with the principle Children’s Act, a new, comprehensive law for the care and protection of children. The Act provides the legislative framework for giving effect to a number of internationally and constitutionally entrenched children’s rights, mainly by providing for a full range of social services for children and their families.
The law replaces the Child Care Act of 1983, and could not come soon enough. Many children are growing up amid complex social challenges. High levels of poverty, unemployment, HIV/Aids, violence, abuse, and alcohol and drug addiction are undermining children’s rights.
The new law focuses on social services aimed at strengthening and supporting families and communities to care for and protect children. We are jubilant over the expected implementation of the Children’s Act next year, the drafting of which started a decade ago. The challenge is to back up this progressive legislation with the necessary budgets and human resources for implementation.
The Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town this week released the third edition of its annual South African Child Gauge, which examines children’s constitutional right to social services.
The Children’s Act plays a key role in realising this right in the context of the developmental social welfare system, which prioritises prevention of and early intervention against child abuse and neglect. The publication reviews some of the key challenges for the implementation of the Act as the first step towards realising children’s rights to care and protection.
Firstly, there is the matter of policy reform: key Department of Social Development policies adhere to the developmental social welfare ideology, but their potential to give effect to children’s right to social services has to be reviewed critically.
The state, for example, relies heavily on the non-profit sector to deliver crucial social services without funding them fully. The Children’s Act has the potential to remedy this since it legally obliges the state either to provide or to fund the provision of a range of social services. Particularly, prevention and early intervention programmes — including positive, non-violent parenting programmes — are recognised.
The Act also promotes the equality of vulnerable children such as those living with disabilities and children in child-headed households.
Budget concerns
Secondly, the implementation of the new legal framework has major budget implications. “Social services” is not part of the equitable share formula used by the National Treasury to allocate money to the provinces. Provincial treasuries decide how to divide the money received from the National Treasury between the different departments.
In this process, provincial departments of social development tend to receive very small budgets from provincial treasuries. This is partly a result of their limited capacity to spend the budgets allocated to them, and partly as a result of social services still being viewed as charity rather than a constitutional right. Hence, social-service spending in the past has been minimal in relation to the needs. Now the Children’s Act mandates that crucial services are budgeted for.
A costing commissioned by the Department of Social Development, reviewed in the latest South African Child Gauge, shows that existing government budgets covered only 25% of the services set out in the old Child Care Act. Since the Children’s Act places greater social-service obligations on the state, a rapid expansion of the budget is crucial for implementation.
Thirdly, the country is facing a severe human resources crisis that negatively affects delivery of social services. According to the South African Council for Social Service Professionals, there were 12 252 registered social workers last year in both the private sector and the government working with all vulnerable groups — not just children. Only about half of these were working for government or non-profit organisations.
The commissioned costing report shows that, for the minimal implementation of the Children’s Act, at least 16 504 social workers will be needed in 2010/11 for children’s social services alone. For full implementation, an estimated 66 329 social workers will be needed by 2010/11.
Practitioners
In addition, a range of social-service practitioners should be employed in creative ways. This will free up social workers’ time to deal with acute cases of abused children and ensure that a truly developmental approach can be implemented by practitioners at community level.
A key challenge is to recognise all social-service practitioners, particularly child and youth care workers and early childhood development workers, who are allocated key roles in the Children’s Act but who are currently struggling to be recognised professionally.
Lastly, evidence shows that the country’s limited number of social workers spend the bulk of their time on administrative tasks involving assistance to families to access social grants. Currently, the complex, court-based foster-child grant rather than the administratively simple child-support grant is used to provide income support to relatives caring for orphaned children.
Instead, social workers’ time could be dedicated to acute child-abuse cases. But, as the child-support grant is currently only available to poor children under the age of 14, caregivers often access the foster-child grant, which is more costly to the state because it involves social workers and the courts. This situation could be remedied if the child-support grant was extended to all children under the age of 18.
The challenges for the implementation of the Children’s Act show that we still have some way to go before the human and constitutional rights of millions of vulnerable children in South Africa are realised. The responsibility now lies with role players in the government and civil society who have the potential to give full effect to the rights in the Act. This will ultimately promote the economic and social development of the country.
Mira Dutschke and Charmaine Smith are two of the editors of the 2007/2008 South African Child Gauge, available on www.ci.org.za