I think that it comes from this generation of leadership in the United Nations, that is beginning to understand what the world requires. But more importantly, what Africa requires. We have never had so much hands-on interest from agencies of the United Nations. In your case, from UNICEF, a colleague Jonathan Lucas from the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. I think that they are making it possible for us, in this case on the front of children, and on the other hand on the front of drug abuse, not to make our own mistakes. They are ensuring that we do not repeat mistakes that have been made elsewhere. That is the value of having them here.
I think that your presence here is a practical presence, an assuring presence that we are indeed doing what we are meant to do. You are also assuring us that we are not a unique situation in the Western Cape, Cape Town and South Africa. Your presence is giving us an indication that we are facing a challenges that others are facing and that we can learn from others and more importantly we can also teach others.
The second point that your presence communicates, is that what appears overwhelming to us, can indeed be overcome. It may not be tomorrow, it may not be the next day, but it can indeed be overcome. You give us hope, a universal hope that we are where others have been and we are probably where others are still going to be. We can only continue in cooperation with all that you represent across the world, so that we can begin to significantly overcome our challenges in the Western Cape.
I also want to thank our representative from the Presidency for being here. I think that we have an overwhelming interest from the Presidency to try and understands what the state of affairs is in the Western Cape despite the nature of its politics. Images of political fluidity, Mayors becoming Premiers, Premiers becoming Mayors and all of those related issues still happen, yet something is going right. Yet we are achieving things, yet we are fighting battles and winning battles. Nothing appears to be insurmountable.
Marble, you must give the President one message: tell the President that the Western Cape is getting things right. Tell the President that people in the Western Cape are getting things right because they have no time to become too cozy with the Premier or with the Mayor for they will be gone very soon.
The President must be told that people and organizations in the Western Cape are learning to depend on themselves and move forward in partnership with government but often not permanently close to government. And maybe some of the other problems across the country are that people may be too state oriented in the center. They rely too much on the state to solve their problems and they demoralize and disempower themselves from the processes of resolving the problems.
What we are institutionalizing today (the Provincial Child Rights Advisory Council) is the way in which organizations such as those represent here, take out insurance policies against the fluidity of government. There is a sense of permanence through the institutionalization of this advisory council. You are being given empowerment and given a great responsibility in the process to keep government on the right track. You are saying that the driver of the train may change, but we will set the tracks, to ensure that government will always maintain its obligation towards its children.
I have tried to encourage this institutionalizing relationship towards government, emphasizing that it is not a lottery, does not depend on who is in office, whoever is in office must inherit it. This is the second major achievement in this week in terms of institutionalizing relationships between government and organizations that contribute significantly to the development of our province. On Tuesday, we launched the Western Cape Religious Leaders Forum, where all major religions came together, forming themselves into an organization and more importantly, on the one hand fulfilling the obligation to the new challenges of the Western Cape.
This forum will fulfill a second role, which is that of maintaining the relevance of religion to the emerging generations of South Africans. Because they know that if they move to ground level, then the churches and the mosques will not only remain to be the refuge for old people. What I think we have come to do today, is to add another chapter in the institutionalization of government's relationship with people. Often when you institutionalize, you face the challenge of whether this is co-option and the basis of compliance and buy in. I want to say to you, that there is never an easy relationship between government and organized civil society in the Western Cape such as those you represent in the journey towards the realization off children's rights.
There is always a critical element that sets up a dialectical relationship between us. To a large extent, government has learned, I have certainly learnt, that you cannot choose who you want to speak to. You cannot choose the most compliant and you cannot choose the most dependent and you cannot choose the most comfortable. Your answers probably lie in those who are most trouble some. That is not an invitation to become troublesome. But, that is probably in the zone of critical independent interaction. It is probably where you are going to get the real dialectic, bringing the real answers to what we require. It is on the basis of this trajectory that I think we launch today's program.
Some may think that the launch of an advisory council on the rights of children could be just another in jeopardy of relationships. What we say to you from the front and as government and I, as Premier is: by inviting you to become this advisory council, we are saying to you that we do not have all the answers. We are saying to you, that the problem is bigger than what we can manage. We are saying to you that we cannot do it alone, we are saying to you that we need your help. We are saying to you, we need partnership with you if we are going to solve the challenges that we face, particularly in the Western Cape.
It is an invitation for you to challenge us, but also, for us to challenge you in return. You must challenge us on how we use our money, where we prioritize our resources, whether we have the right programs, whether the projects work. We must also be able to challenge how much of your money goes to institution maintenance and how much to programs on the ground. If we can be honest on these kinds of issues, then we have something close to a marriage.
We all have our own responsibilities but that does not mean that we have the right to do it alone. Government today therefore says to you, we recognize that we do not have the right to go it alone and not do what we want, outside of our partnership with you. That I think, is the overall significance of what we have come to do here today.
We live in a world that crushes spirits, that destroys children's souls, makes them old before their time, exposes them to things that must come in time, that removes from them their innocence. We must therefore do much more than accept the responsibility to protect children. We must exceed this obligation and make concerted efforts to change the lived circumstances of our children. That is the mission that we must embody. That is the hymn that we all have to sing, within that, different instruments, different voices. But there has to be a coherent approach to this matter.
This council creates the platform for us to be coherent in dealing with this problem. The statistics tell us that our children face physical assault, murder, common assault, assault with intentions to do bodily harm. And in year 2000 alone, across the country 37000 children experienced these attacks.
The second most common crimes committed against children are sexual assault. This category includes rape, sodomy, indecent assault and other sexual offences. In 2000, reported sexual crimes against children numbered 25,578.
Some 25% of non-natural deaths of children younger than 18 years between January and June 1999 were homicides. Nearly half of the homicides were the result of a firearm and a further third was perpetrated with a sharp object. Homicide victims were predominantly male, black and on average 15 years old.
I was horrified when I went back to the school that I taught in 1985, when I attended one of the anniversaries in school, only to find that of the children in my class, a class of 22 that 7 had died before the age of 21 brutally.
Now you can imagine what is happening on the Cape Flats, with statistics showing that how many children were murdered in the Western Cape for the preceding financial year. 105 children have been murdered and out of the 77 cases that were investigated, 12 were murdered in their own homes and only 12 were murdered by strangers. That speaks to a culture of violence and brutality. There is brutality and there is violence but it is not accidental.
These statistics tell us, that those whom children love and trust and look up to for care, are the very ones who betray that love, that trust and that care. Whether it is a neighbor, whether it is a parent, whether it is a boyfriend of a parent, whether it is someone who lives in the house, whether it is a friend, whether it is a friend of the siblings or whatever the case may be.
That is what we have to challenge each other on. Government, NGO's and Civil Society can not do business as usual. Because business as usual is often just the normal things we do, get the social workers in, get the office opened, get the Toyota, the computer, cell phone and all that we need to set up the office infrastructure. Here the challenge is that there is a breakdown in the social fabric that ought to hold us together. We have to be able to challenge each other about the paradigm that we are currently functioning in. Because this paradigm is not about the external enemy, the paradigm is about the enemy within.
Values of morality are first and foremost nurtured and instilled in the home. Since parents are the custodians of these values, how do we then teach parents to parent? You must have a license to drive a car, but you need no license to be a parent. The point that I am making is just how deep our problem is. What do we do in child headed households where children themselves are parents? What do we do about child trafficking? Because there is a market of perverted people across the world, who want to lay their hands on our children. They think that, because our children are poor, they have the right to take them away. What do we do? About drug and gang lords who make our children dependent on TIK? Who makes our children sell their bodies for TIK? That is what is happening and it cannot be business as usual.
So this is not a watchdog arrangement that we are setting up here. If you have come here to be each others watchdogs, you are in the wrong place. If you are coming here to lobby each other for more money, then you are in the wrong place. Let us develop the program and let us fund the program and then let us see who can best do the work. Let us also allow the specialists amongst us to do what needs to be done. Where you need partnerships let establish those partnerships but let us all be part of this orchestra. That I think is the challenge that comes out today because now the paradigm has shifted completely.
This is not a place for outdated practices. We need the most creative people. We are going to need people to liberate themselves from old thinking patterns. We need you, as we build houses, for example, to be able to problematize things such as, how is it that sexualized adults share a room with innocent children? We are not living in ideal situations. We need to ensure that as government we do not exacerbate conditions for abuse to sprout, by means of unintended consequences such as overcrowding in the type of housing we provide our people.
Has anyone developed a methodology of researching and finding solutions for the reality of structural features of poverty environments that raise the risk of abuse? We said we would like to freeze the innocence of our children and keep it with them, but when we are having this overcrowding that we have in which sexualized adults co-habit with innocent children then we have sexualized children.
The way in which our people need to take in strange lodgers due to poverty is a problem. When they go off to work, we can only imagine what goes on when strange lodgers co-exist in houses with un-sexualized teenagers. So it is business unusual and these are the things that we need to advice each other on and to develop methodologies and marketing strategies on as well as interventionist programs in order to deal effectively with these kinds of problems.
I am feeling a lot more encouraged, but where we work together, we can have results in the shortest possible period of time. I am very happy that, Dr. Gilbert Lawrence our Head of Community Safety is with us. Because yesterday, we were able to announce the first quarter results since we made sustained coordinated and empowered interventions in the 15 most vulnerable areas in the Western Cape. Now if we can achieve results such as those I will briefly share with you now, on that front, imagine if we are able to focus on the collected resources amongst us to make a difference in specific areas. The temptation is always to spread our resources, with greater activity but without impact and focus.
Focusing police resources and the rest of Government resources, NGO resources in those 15 areas, 56 drug outlets for example have been closed, 5 TIK factories has been closed and 2 096 arrests has been made of those who are dealing with drugs or owning drug outlets, for example. We have been able to seize 3 400 grams of TIK, 260 000 grams of dagga, 481 ecstasy tablets and 305 heroin tablets, arresting in the process, 72 high fliers and that is in the first 3 months of this program.
I want to say to you that, what you come here today for, the rights of the children are not separate from these realities that I am speaking to you about. It is addicted individuals who are perpetrators of crimes against children. That enemy within is often the enemy who in their sober state, would love the child, but in an alcoholic or a TIK state, would harm the child. These are not separate battles, so you insert yourself within an even bigger paradigm concerning the social problems at community level. That is what I think Government is putting at your disposal. The ability to influence the way in which all of us do things and the resource base from which to draw in order to implement programmes and effect greater impact.
What are we doing on the level of Early Childhool Development (ECD)? Our Expanded Public Works Program (EPWP) does not only have to be about the building of roads and working with bricks. The best EPWP will be young people who are caring enough and educated enough to take care of our children and we pay them a stipend to look after our children and give them a good start in life, knowledge about drug addiction and its effects. So we have to be able to intervene in concrete programs like ECD and others to ensure effective early intervention for the good of our children.
In conclusion, I really want to thank all of you, for being here for the past two days, for sharing your expertise, for being willing to enter into this critical partnership with us, I look forward to your work having an impact within our Social Dialogue Directorate.
I look forward to constructive interactions with you whether it is on the front of women in dialogue, the religious forum, the youth commission and now the office of the rights of the child and related matters that we can be advised on by you. I think we are slowly and systematically building up a full institutional armory in order for us to collectively and coherently meet the challenges of the Western Cape. That is where you fit in, that is the bigger picture which you are a part of. We thank you very much for being part of this program, for committing to it and for entering into this partnership, and I am sure that you know by now who will be the advisory committee, so I am looking into that, that is work in progress but I certainly look forward to success at the level of child right's as we are beginning to be more successful on the fight of drugs and gangsterism in the Western Cape.
Thank you very much.
