“Evil flourishes when good people do nothing” – Focus on violence against our children

I read an article on IOL recently in which it stated that a 7 year old girl had been found dead in a shack, raped and murdered. I waited to see what the media response would be, if this story would get the prominent media attention it so rightly deserved. I have so far seen nothing transpire in the media, and a really lacklustre response from civil society. It pains me to think of how this child’s life was snuffed out so inhumanely. Were she a bit wealthier, or whiter, or part of a more affluent neighbourhood, maybe the email petitions would’ve started doing the rounds like they do when a tragedy of even remote similarity occurs in other communities. Sadly, not even the media seem to be following this one up.

It saddens and angers me to think how desensitised we have become as a society, when incidents like this don’t even cause us to bat an eyelid.

They say evil flourishes when good people do nothing. Well, evil is flourishing and it appears that good people only do something when it happens in their own back yard.

Laws are meant to be an extension of the general will of the people. I hear all this talk about people wanting the death penalty brought back. While floor crossing legislation can certainly be seen as a violation of the will of the people, surely a referendum on the death penalty is now something that should be under government consideration. Unless of course, government has lost all respect for the will of the people and the very premise of democracy which is ”majority rule”.

We’ve got a selection of 2 of the best replies we’ve received since Liam Aspeling was reported missing. Thankfully, Liam Aspeling was returned safe and sound to his family, but something drastic needs to be done in order to curb the current onslaught on our nation’s children, lest we lose our own humanity and our right to the moral high ground.

Regards,
Charles Ash

What the people had to say about the recent spate of child kidnappings:

Hi, my name is Tanya and I’m a 29 year old proud mother of two little boys, aged 8 and 5 years old. I guard my kids a bit “over-protectively” and “selfishly” as my eldest son put it to me. I am fully aware of the extent of my obsession with the safety of my sons, but I ask you “Is this an unnecessary obsession”? I think not. With the rate of kidnappings and rapes and murders!!! I tell my boys exactly what is going on this sick world we live in. Yes, I know that I’m scaring the living daylights out of them, but sugar-coating what could happen just doesn’t cut it anymore. They need to be aware. And please don’t think that this only applies to little girls, because sadly, it DOES NOT!!!! Whether you have sons or daughters, please, please guard them with your life!!. I live in Eldorado Park and the little girl that was murdered last week lived in my street!!! And there is no such as running away either, because it happens everywhere, a fancy suburb will not protect anyone from the sick crazies out there.

Please step up on the protection of your kid’s parents. Nobody can do it for you…….if I could afford to I would leave my job in a heart beat to be with my boys 24/7, but they need to eat as well, so that is not even an option right now. Parents we need to stand together and form an impenetrable chain of protection around our children. Let’s not wait for it to happen to another little somebody, don’t let this little girls death be in vain, it was an unfortunate warning to all parents out there not to take advantage of the fact that “it won’t happen to me”. Because nobody is too rich, too poor or too uneducated/educated to make themselves an exception, because none of us are exceptions!!!

TH

This one hit rather close to home. This boy’s mother happens to be a friend and colleague. Last night I sent out a prayer request to everyone on my phone book because I felt the overwhelming need to do… SOMETHING. There is a line from a poem that says ‘Heed Your Urgent Inner Voice’ … my inner voice says something must be done while my other inner voice says ‘What?’.

We’ve become so desensitised as a society. We hear these things on television and radio, see the pictures in the paper and we’re saddened, angered and shocked until the next commercial break, song, or the cartoon on the back page. If we’re really good, we whisper a hasty prayer. If we’re even better, we address it in our night time prayers… but there’s so much to address and to pray about and it goes something like ‘And God… The World??????’

Criminal tendencies are hitting trends reminiscent of seasonal fashion… it used to be hijackings, then family murders… now, the ‘IN’ thing is kidnapping children. Then abusing them, raping them and murdering them. When I heard about Liam yesterday, my heart stopped – not quite literally, but close enough. And I’m hoping and praying and wishing and crossing everything in the hopes that this is the child who defies the odds and comes home, irrespective of whatever the reason is that he’s gone. Is it too much to hope that they’ll bring back happy endings?

His mother Anastasia hit it on the head last night when she said ‘Why my child? I haven’t done anything to anybody, I don’t have money or anything’. You see, thats the thing… nothing exempts you – not what you are, or what you are not, not what you have or what you don’t have and generally speaking, not what you’ve done, or what you haven’t done. The country’s criminals have fully and completely embraced the practise of non discrimination. Go figure.

So where do we go from here? What do we do short of turning into the very element we despise? What do you say when a mother is yearning for her baby? When she’s cried so much she has no more left and all thats left is the red, puffy eyes in the saddened swollen face and all she can do is sit. She just sits there struggling to breathe as darkness comes and she doesn’t know if her baby is safe and she hates to wonder if he’ll ever be safe again.

If it takes a village to raise a child then what can this village do to bring that child back, safe to the fold? Villages were so much safer, so much more trustworthy, they used to be the haven. Now we hide inside our homes and sometimes we’re even faced with the reality that the evil lurks within our walls.

The village is passport-protected, the village has high walls, the village has sentries posted in the form of neighbours, but this isn’t enough. The village teaches a child to look right, left then right again when crossing the road, the village teaches a child to say its prayers at night, the village says ‘Don’t Talk to Strangers’. Yet in all of this, in its need, or rather its ability to protect its children, the village is rendered impotent – proof of which is in the face of another mother waiting for her child to come home.

Jericho