In these 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children, religious leaders and faith communities can act to use the unique mechanisms of their faith traditions to help end violence against children. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
Religious leaders play important, public and highly trusted roles in South Africa where more than 80% of people adhere to a formal faith tradition. They are the first person many South Africans go to for advice or support on a range of issues.
In a 2019 evidence review on faith and violence against children, one of the country’s child sector experts commented: “There are a huge number of people for whom their faith is a critically important part of their lives. It is the role of faith leaders to set an example but also to talk about things like respect for human dignity, appreciation of diversity, obligations, we all have rights … We need churches and faith leaders to search their texts and their hearts for ways to make humankind nicer to each other. To forget about power and control and dominance.”
Violence against children is a major global problem. Half of the world’s children (more than a billion) experience violence every year. Every seven minutes, an adolescent dies because of violence. Children experience violence mainly from adults who are supposed to protect them as well as from other children. This predominantly takes place in homes and schools. According to a report by the United Nations UN Children’s Fund’, Hidden in Plain Sight, usually someone else knows about this violence but fails to act.
This reality is of great concern in South Africa which also has a long structural legacy of social violence. Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of its 1995 ratification of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child and related national child legislation. But the story remains bleak for the more than 20 million children who live here. Longitudinal tracking studies over 20 years suggest that nearly 40% of South African children encounter or witness multiple forms of violence with over half reporting physical abuse by caregivers, teachers or relatives.
These statistics feed a vicious cycle of intergenerational violence and trauma shaped by the hands of people that children know. The cycle is also gendered, with boys who experience or witness violence, especially in homes, seen as more likely to repeat those patterns as adult perpetrators, and girls more likely to experience these patterns as adult victims. This vicious cycle must be broken. One key strategy for change is transforming harmful social norms, often underpinned by cultural and religious justifications.
Despite constitutional court judgments in 2020 closing loopholes around faith-based justifications of violent discipline, far too many children remain at genuine risk. They also face a systemic crisis of care and neglect, with cuts to early childhood funding, as well as insecure access to food for millions, resulting in childhood malnourishment and stunting, which affects the rest of their lives. The World Health Organisation has gathered substantial evidence as to what strategies work to end violence against children. But they require implementation by all societal stakeholders. In 2017, South Africa signed up as a Pathfinder country to the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, committing all stakeholders to accelerate action in this area by 2030, including religious leaders.
A specific body of evidence has been published in recent years about the unique roles of faith and religious leaders in this shared task of ending violence against children. Leaders within faith traditions hold both formal and informal positions of power and influence within communities, whether they are a local Sunday school teacher, an Imam of a large mosque or a Catholic bishop. Development actors often focus solely on the social roles that these leaders play such as being gatekeepers for access into local communities or providing buildings and volunteers for social projects. But this means they miss the opportunity to draw on their spiritual capital, that is, a cluster of faith resources and authoritative influences, through the positive use of religious doctrines, rituals, sacred texts and experiences. This spiritual capital plays a unique, and important, role in supporting, or without critique, in resisting, wider efforts to end violence against children.
In these 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children, religious leaders and faith communities can act to use the unique mechanisms of their faith traditions to help end violence against children. An article published in The Thinker offers six practical ways in which they can do this:
- Promoting positive beliefs about children:
- Most faith traditions require their adherents to care and protect children, especially the most vulnerable. Some, such as Christianity, place God incarnated as a vocal child at the core of their faith tradition and include numerous stories of the risks he faced in relation to many different adults in his life.
- Critically engaging with sacred texts in new ways: All ancient sacred texts include proverbs, stories and rules that are based on the child rearing philosophies of their times. Faith leaders must critically re-engage these sacred texts in ways that promote child safety and wellbeing and can enable the often-silenced voices of children in these texts to be heard.
- Using religious rituals to centre children and their voices: Faith traditions often provide accompaniment across the life span. Involving children and their voices and needs directly in religious rituals as well as creatively redesigning child-centred rituals, like baptism, can promote the shared responsibility of the community for holistic childcare and wellbeing.
- Undertaking holistic spiritual counselling: Religious leaders have influence and reach into family spaces. Helping parents commit to non-violent, democratic households, alternative methods of discipline and meeting children’s needs for voice, food and play form vital steps in shaping healthier family structures that integrate body and soul and in ensuring that faith is not used to justify harm.
- Weekly religious messages: Those being harmed and those who are harming others at all levels of society both sit within institutions of faith each week. Parents, grandparents and children can all hear these ethical messages about what God requires of them. Faith leaders can take them on a journey to create child-safe community inside and outside their institutions.
- Transforming negative beliefs: Many faith institutions and some of their leaders have been perpetrators, or have stood silent and complicit in the face of child abuse. Faith beliefs have also been misinterpreted to demonise children, sanctify practices that harm them or to reinforce holy hierarchies that see children as inferior or require them to be ‘seen and not heard’. Religious leaders can speak out boldly to educate around this misuse.
Another child expert also reinforces these insights, saying: “We need to involve faith leaders not only because they are influential but first and foremost because in many cases, there are underlying beliefs, social norms and values that are highlighted in or by the religious sector that need to be changed.”
This task requires bravery from South African religious leaders to step forwards into this task, amid the competing demands on their time. Nelson Mandela tells us that there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a child rights ambassador himself, soberly reminds us that violence will beget more violence and that if we do not change how we treat our children, we may reap a whirlwind of fear and misery.
Religious leaders don’t need to take this step alone. In 2025, the Sexual Violence Research Initiative is pioneering a new virtual peer learning course on engaging the mechanisms of faith to end violence against children. This offers religious leaders and those working with them across the African continent, continued professional development, drawing on expertise of over 300 child sector practitioners and faith actors from 60 countries. Will your religious leader be one of them?
Dr Selina Palm is the chair of the Sexual Violence Research Initiative Working Group on Faith and Ending Violence against Children. She is also a violence prevention researcher at Stellenbosch University and a faith leader at Rondebosch United Church focused on young people’s ministry.