Researchers have “uncovered the unthinkable” - that South Africa has one of the world’s highest reported rates of murders of babies.
|||Johannesburg - A passer-by heard the cries of a 5-day-old baby girl who had been left to die under a tree in the Free State. In Gauteng, a few days later, motorists on the N1 reportedly drove around a newborn girl dumped, with her umbilical cord attached, near the 14th Avenue exit in Roodepoort.
Last week, two teenagers in KwaZulu-Natal raped and stabbed a one-year-old baby 17 times. The baby is in hospital, fighting for her life.
This is the crisis of baby abandonment and murder in the country, where pioneering research by a team from the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the University of Cape Town has “uncovered the unthinkable” - that South Africa has one of the world’s highest reported rates of murders of babies.
The researchers say the killing of hundreds of newborns and infants a year- most of them by their mothers - is a “serious social and public health problem”.
“Mothers were identified as the perpetrators in all of the neonaticides and were the most common perpetrators,” the researchers write in the international peer-reviewed journal PLOS Medicine.
The team estimate the South African rate for neonaticide - the killing of a child within the first 28 days of life - to be 19.6 in every 100 000 live births, and that for infanticide - killing a child under one year - to be 27.7 in every 100 000 live births.
“These rates are surpassed only by an estimate for the Tanzanian city Dar es Salaam of 27.7 to every 100 000 live births and are much higher than those reported in developed settings.
“Our study shows that the first six days of life are the time point of highest risk for being killed.”
The researchers investigated data from a random sample of 38 medico-legal laboratories in urban and rural settings for 2009. Data was collected from police interviews.
The researchers estimated 454 children under the age of five were killed in 2009. Most deaths (53 percent) were among newborns aged zero to six days and 74 percent were under a year old.
The team say in their report, SA National Child Homicide Study, that there is “a critical need for intervention to assist vulnerable mothers. Multisectoral prevention strategies are needed”.
Saturday Star
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