Every June, we return to the children of 1976.
We picture the rows of schoolchildren walking out of their classrooms in Soweto, and the image of twelve-year-old Hector Pieterson being carried through the smoke. We have honoured them, rightly, as the youth. But the word “youth” can age them. It can allow us to remember them as young revolutionaries before we remember what they were first: children.
They were schoolchildren who should have been worrying about homework, friendships and the ordinary business of growing up. Instead, they were handed a brutal adult world and forced to find courage inside it because the adults around them could not keep them safe.
I think about that small slip, from child to youth, often. Not because it dishonours 1976, but because we make the same slip constantly, and not only about the past. We make it about our own children, now. We are in a great hurry to call them grown.
The world we are handing them is not a gentler one. It is faster, louder, and more saturated with content and contact than any generation has had to face at this young age. Much of it reaches them through screens and digital spaces that many adults are still struggling to understand. It is a world that arrived before our rules, our schools, our homes and our conversations were ready for it.
And yet, we expect children to navigate it maturely and safely. Too often, we expect them to do so with less and less of us beside them.
Some are reading this year’s child protection figures as proof that something has gone wrong with our children. I read them differently. I see them as proof of what happens when children are sent into a world they are not ready to navigate alone.
Among the figures released during Child Protection Month were deeply painful statistics from the Department of Justice, including increases in reported statutory rape cases, children recorded in relation to sexual offences, and victims under the age of 18. These numbers should disturb us. They should also make us careful.
A reported case is not the same as a conviction. An administrative record is not the full story of a child’s life. And when child victims, child offenders and statutory categories are placed side by side without enough explanation, there is a risk that numbers harden into verdicts. Children can become fixed in the public imagination as perpetrators before a court, social worker, family or protection system has properly asked what happened in their lives.
Much of the research on children who sexually harm points to histories marked by violence suffered or witnessed, neglect, and exposure to things no child should have to see. That does not mean every child who is harmed will harm another. It means that many of the children we are now filing away as perpetrators were, not long before, children we failed to protect.
This is why the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund does not meet these figures with fear and does not answer them with a hunger to punish.
A child who causes harm is still a child. This is not an argument against accountability. It is an argument for the right kind of accountability: one that recognises harm, protects others, asks what happened, and creates a path towards rehabilitation.
When our first instinct is only to label and punish, we make the same slip again. We declare a child grown so that we can hold them responsible for a world we did not prepare them to survive.
So, the question Youth Month puts to me is not how to contain these children. It is older and more uncomfortable than that. Are we letting go of our children too soon? Are we doing to them, quietly and at scale, a version of what history did to the class of 1976, pushing them into a world they are not equipped for and mistaking their survival for readiness?
The youth of 1976 had agency thrust upon them. They rose to it magnificently, and the country owes them a debt it can never repay. But an agency forced on a child who has not been prepared for it is not a gift. It is abandonment dressed as trust.
The work of raising a child is the work of building that agency with them, in time and with support, so that when they cross into adulthood, they arrive whole and healthy, and not just intact. That work is slow. It happens in homes, classrooms, clinics and community halls. It is the patient, unglamorous accompaniment that our own policy promises children first and that our budgets keep deferring to last.
Nelson Mandela, whose legacy gave rise to our organisation and helped shape our democracy, said: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
Youth Month should be the moment we make a different promise: not to let go too soon, and not to call a child grown for our own convenience.
The children of 1976 were given no choice but to grow up fast. Our children still have one.
Whether they get to keep that choice depends on whether the adults around them are willing to stay.
