‘Abuse continued to rise in S.A.’

Press, 26 June 1987, Page 24

‘Abuse continued to rise in S.A.’

NZPA-Reuter Washington Police repression and abuse of children rose under South Africa’s national state of emergency, with black children as young as 12 being beaten and tortured, according to a report.

“The incidents of torture, arbitrary killing and unlawful imprisonment of children continue unabated,” said the report by the United States branch of Defence for Children International (D.C.1.), a Geneva-based human rights group.

Detained children reported they had been beaten with rifle butts, suffocated with wet nylon bags and suspended from ceilings by chains around the wrist and spun in circles, a treatment, they said, police called the “helicopter”. The report estimated that more than 10,000 children had been held without trial since last June. The number of children held would continue to rise.

The report, “Children Under Apartheid,” is one of the most comprehensive of recent reports which have shown widespread detention of children under 18 years of age.

In response to the findings, Mr Chris Streeter, press counsellor at the South African embassy, said: “This is the biggest lot of rubbish I have heard on this earth.

"If they believe in statistics of 10,000 being detained and more than 1000 children being shot by police, than I can say that this is only disinformation.”

Michael Jupp, the report’s author, said a mother he met while conducting interviews in South Africa last year refuted Government denials of police brutality when she outlined the case of her detained son, Joseph, aged 12. “She spoke of how the police had come to get her son, and how she finally saw him in the hospital. She could barely recognise him because his eyes were swollen over. He was heavily beaten by the police,” Mr Jupp said.

“There was no anger on her part. There was just total resignation. One has the feeling that torture in one form or the other is more likely used on children than not.”

The report said that, among forms of torture, electric shock had become a common practice: “Police vehicles have been modified so that electric shock torture can be applied to children even before their arrival at the police station.”

The D.C.1.-United States report concluded that “children are being arrested simply because they are children.”

“Children can be arrested and detained without trial just for belonging to a school youth organisation, for wearing the wrong T-shirt or merely for being out in the evening.”

The report recommended that a children’s legal centre be established to provide expert legal representation to detained children and to train lawyers in juvenile law.