A lot of the law around children requires ordinary citizens who know about child abuse or molestation to report it. It is in fact illegal to know about this stuff and not report it — if you don’t report, you are complicit. This makes sense in some respects, and some respects it doesn’t.
Obviously it makes sense because children are often too scared or too little to speak up for themselves, but sometimes it is a difficult decision to make because you might know that the child could end up in a shelter or home that could make things worse for him or her. Reporting could mean removing a family’s breadwinner. In any case, even though we are legally obliged to report, it is not a simple decision to make.
What about for adults? My previous post spoke about the many women who die each year because we sit in our homes and are too scared or polite to go next door and see what the fuss is about. In an email response, I heard that if you were to respond every time you heard a beating, you would spend your life involved in other family’s lives, and could put yourself in serious danger. This makes sense when your proximity could put your life in danger. Ideally you should be able to call the police, but as we know, sometimes they don’t always respond the way we would like them to.
But what about if you aren’t in proximity? In cases of rape, the first person that the survivor tells is known as the first report witness. You may know the survivor, or you may simply have been the first person s/he met after the incident. If you are the first report witness you may be called on in court, especially if you have witnessed the rape as well (for example in cases of Compelled Rape). Do you think you should have the additional requirement of having to report the rape as well?
In this really interesting piece on mandatory reporting a rape survivor argues that they should have to report, because sometimes as the survivor you want to but you are too scared, or too upset or just can’t do it just yet. Of course, if two people reported the incident and were willing to testify in court, it would make the case against the perpetrator stronger. But it is not as simple as that.
There are many complexities including the involvement of children. If you are a child who sees dad repeatedly raping your mum, the legal burden would be on you to report. In addition, what if you are the first report witness and you go to report the crime, but the survivor has not? Do you think you should report it even though s/he doesn’t want you to? What about if the first person who finds out is a doctor? Should hospital staff be required to report?
It’s a complex issue which is dealt with from the perspective of a survivor in the piece mentioned above. But what about from the perspective of the person who’s reporting? If you know, should you tell?
Ouch Jen – you put it so well. In a patriarchal society there are so many obstacles for reporting problems of abuse. This is our society in the main – how do we change it? How do we change the age old patriarchal cultures to realise that the potential mothers of their “sons” deserve respect, education and a life of their own?
If all the women are abbused and killed in these societies, they will self destruct -m is that what they want? When I think Afghanistan the answer appears to be a resounding”YES”. In SA it is rather more confused because our patriachists are so lazy!
Report it. You don’t need to provide your name to do so; enough particulars to enable the investigator to trace the victim/survivor is enough. There is no legal obligation on the general public to report such cases where children are involved (unless you work in certain specific professions). We should not need a prescript to do the right thing anyway. I cannot agree that placement in a place of safety or a home could be ‘worse for’ a child victim of rape, and in any event removal of the victim would be the last resort in most cases. It is the perpetrator who’ll be removed, and only when the mother tries to influence the child into withdrawing the case or is a co-offender will the child be taken away from her. Which would hardly be a bad thing. Very often removal from the family home is a threat uttered against children by perpetrators to force them not to disclose the abuse. Break the cycle. Report your suspicion. BTW no-one who reports a bona fide suspicion can be held accountable in civil court; the authorities must still investigate and gather evidence before they effect an arrest. If the offender wants to litigate, he must do so against SAPS and the NPA. By reporting you do not accuse anyone of wrongdoing directly, unless of course you are an actual witness. You merely report that you have a reasonable suspicion which warrants investigation.
Just because someone is putting food on the table does not give them the right to beat and rape children. It is your moral obligation to report it and to help them.
I think we should tell but like you said there is fear; and because of the kind of society we live in our fear comes first before our sense of moral obligation (it’s a global problem). One of my students was being abused by her boyfriend and she refused to report it, when I offered to go with her she agreed but on the day of, I get a very threatening phone call from the boyfriend. The student in question only came back to campus two days later with bruises. I convinced her to talk to a counsellor and we managed to get him arrested but it was a battle to get her to step out of a place of fear.
I think we should tell but we need to be smart about it because it can cause more harm to the person you’re trying to protect sometimes but telling will ultimately help them.
There’s great power in fear and that’s what is really crippling.
Any time you know that a crime is being committed or has been, you are obliged to tell or you are an accessory- this applies to any crime but is more important in the case of any kind of abuse.
@Jen in this post is actually raising a much wider issue, that of how do we respond to others misdemeanours?
Because the types of people’s misdemeanours are infinite in number this is actually an unanswerable question. Sure we need to devise just laws to cope with the misdemeanours as we identify them but we are never going to be able to cover all the bases in this manner. The place we need to start is with the source of the misdemeanours and that is the social conditioning that people undergo whilst growing up.
I am currently staying in the UK and I was reading a local urban newspaper. The crime section reported on cases that had been passing through the local courts and it was interesting that the great majority of the offenders involved lived in the poorer areas of the town. The reality is that the bigger the income disparities within a society the greater the social dysfunction of that society. The UK has great income disparities. We in South Africa have even worse income disparities and they have been steadily worsening since 1994. No amount of lawmaking will be able to put right what has been made wrong at this basic level of society.
It’s a fine line.
While my son had plenty of hidings and I shouted on and off for years, the couple of people who told me I abused him did so from a distance.
Not for bruises they saw (there were none), but because he told a teacher at boarding school that I wouldn’t let him take a jersey back to school with him.
Looking back, I realise this was probably the easiest way for him, at 10 years, to tell the teacher ‘Look, I’m not cold and I really don’t feel like walking all the way back to the hostel for a jersey I don’t want to wear or might have lost.’ He didn’t think she’d mess with his mother. But she and the headmaster and the psychologist the headmaster insisted on, all had a high old time based on the way I had supposedly left him to freeze. Not one of them cared a jot about the true situation and my now grown-up son still can’t believe how it all got so out of hand…
It is really difficult to decide which way you should go. There is a big danger that by reporting the crime, you will be abusing the trust and the safe space of a rape survivor. Perhaps if your reporting is done in consultation with him or her then this is a more empowering exercise.