South African law and policy recognise that violence against women and violence against children often happen in the same homes. But too often, the people living through it have to navigate systems that split their reality into parts.
In many households, the harm facing children sits alongside violence against women and other female caregivers, shaped by the same patterns of gendered power and coercive control. If we are serious about child protection, our institutions have to respond to the reality.
I know this not only as a legal scholar but also through lived professional experience. For eight years, I worked in frontline community-based legal support with families affected by violence. A woman might have needed a protection order while trying to keep her children safe, fed and in school. A child’s vulnerability often sat in a wider pattern of fear, control and instability at home. What often fell between systems was not just information but responsibility. Everyone could see part of the crisis, yet no one was required to hold the whole picture.
Women’s safety matters here not only because children depend on them but because women are entitled to live free from violence in their own right.
What remains missing is consistent integrated practice. The problem is not simply that services are separate. It is that they too often ask the wrong questions. Instead of asking only whether there is a woman at risk or a child at risk, institutions should also be asking what patterns of coercion, dependency and fear are structuring the home and who is being asked to carry the consequences.
That does not mean collapsing specialised services into a single system. It means making child protection, gender-based violence services, policing and social relief work together around connected risk. The services often operate through different mandates, intake processes and reporting systems. The result is familiar: repeated disclosure, missed warning signs and interventions that fail to account for the wider pressures facing a family.
The South African Child Gauge 2025 makes clear why this matters. It argues that violence against women and violence against children often intersect in the same homes, share common risk factors and drive intergenerational cycles of harm. Its value here is not only in the alarming scale of violence, though it reports that 42% of children have experienced maltreatment by a caregiver. It is in showing that the harms are often produced in the same structures of gendered power. When institutions respond in fragments, families are left to prove, again and again, what violence has made painfully clear in their lives.
But integration is not innocent. It can easily become another way of scrutinising women without supporting them. In a context where systems too often blame mothers for harms produced by abusive partners and weak institutions, child protection can turn into surveillance rather than support. Protection systems often notice women most sharply at the point where they can be judged for failing to protect, rather than supported to survive violence. A more integrated response has to resist that logic. It has to ask better questions, assign responsibility more honestly and recognise women as rights-bearing subjects, not just as conduits to children’s safety.
That should change what Children’s Month asks of us. The reform that is needed is not only administrative. It is also conceptual. It means asking connected questions at first contact, building referral systems that do not force women to retell trauma from scratch and funding community-based organisations to work across the realities families face. Better coordination matters but it will remain inadequate if women are trapped by poverty, care burdens and unequal power at home.
The question is no longer whether South African law and policy recognise that the harms often overlap. They do. The question is why, knowing this, institutions ask women and children to survive systems built to see only fragments. Children do not live neatly separated realities. Until our institutions stop expecting families to carry the burden of proving across separate systems what violence has made clear in their lives, Children’s Month will remain a language of protection that too many families cannot recognise in practice.
Rethabile Mosese is an admitted attorney, accredited mediator and LLD student at the University of Pretoria.