Every June we return to the children of 1976. We picture the rows of schoolchildren walking out of their classrooms in Soweto and the boy carried lifeless through the smoke, Hector Pieterson, who was 12 years old.
We have honoured them, rightly, as the youth.
But the word “youth” ages them. It lets us hold them in memory as young revolutionaries rather than as what they were: schoolchildren.
Schoolchildren who should have been worrying about homework but were instead handed a brutally grown world and made to find their courage inside it because the adults around them could not keep them safe.
I think about that small slip, from child to youth, every now and then. Not because it dishonours 1976 but because we make the same slip constantly. And not only about the past. We make it about our own children now. We are in a great hurry to call them grown.
Unprepared for a new world
The world we are handing them is not a gentler one. It is faster, louder and more saturated with content and contact than any generation has met this young.
Much of it reaches them through a screen we never learnt to navigate ourselves, in a digital world that arrived before our rules, our schools or our conversations were ready for it.
We expect them to cross it mature and whole.
We expect them to do it with fewer and fewer of us beside them, holding their hands.
This year’s child protection figures are being read as proof that something has gone wrong with our children.
I read them differently: as proof of what happens when children are sent into a world they are not ready to navigate alone.
Disturbing statistics
Among the figures released during Child Protection Month were deeply painful statistics from the justice department:
• Statutory rape cases increased from 127 in the 2024-25 financial year to 199 in 2025-26;
• 22 reported statutory rape cases involved children recorded as having committed the offence;
• 890 children were recorded in relation to rape offences; and
• 129 rape victims were under the age of 18.
These numbers should disturb us.
But the way they are presented also matters. In a single paragraph, statutory rape, children recorded as having committed offences and child victims appear side by side, without enough care to explain what each category means.
That ambiguity matters because a reported case is not the same as a conviction (and we need convictions) and an administrative record is not the same as the full story of a child’s life.
If we are not careful, numbers harden into verdicts and children become fixed in the public
imagination as perpetrators before a court, social worker or protection system has had the opportunity to ask the first real question about their lives.
Much of the research on children who sexually harm finds children’s histories marked by violence, both suffered and witnessed, by neglect and by exposure to things no child should see.
That does not mean every child who is harmed goes on to harm another. It means that many of the children we are filing as perpetrators were, not long before, children we failed to protect.
The right accountability
This is why the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund does not meet the figures with fear and does not answer them with a hunger to punish.
A child who causes harm is still a child.
This is not an argument that such children should face no accountability. It is an argument about what kind of accountability fits a child: one aimed at understanding what happened to them and providing opportunities for rehabilitation.
To reach first for labelling, punishment and the adult machinery is to make the same slip one more time, declaring a child grown so that we can hold them responsible for a world we failed to prepare them for.
The question Youth Month puts to me is not how to contain these children. It is older and more uncomfortable than that. Are we letting go of our children too soon?
Are we doing to them, quietly and at scale, a version of what history did to the class of 1976, pushing them into a world they are not equipped for and mistaking their survival for readiness?
The youth of 1976 had agency thrust upon them. They rose to it magnificently.
The country owes them a debt it can never repay.
But agency forced on a child who has not been prepared for it is not a gift. It is abandonment dressed as trust.
The adult’s role
The work of raising a child is the work of building that agency with them, in time and with support, so that when they cross into adulthood, they arrive whole and healthy, not just intact.
That work is slow. It happens in homes and classrooms and clinics and community halls. It is the patient, unglamorous accompaniment that our own policy promises children first and that our budgets keep deferring until last.
As the founder of our organisation and democracy, Nelson Mandela, stated: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
Youth Month should be the moment we make a different promise: not to let go too soon and not to call a child grown for our own convenience.
The children of 1976 were given no choice but to grow up fast. Our children still have one.
Whether they get to keep that choice depends on whether the adults around them are willing to stay.
Samkelisiwe Mnguni is the Youth Leadership programme manager at the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.