Please find attached soundbite by Angel Khanyile MP, a soundbite by Lisa Schickerling MP, a soundbite by Michéle Clarke MP and a soundbite by Nazley Sharif MP.
Today, the Democratic Alliance (DA) Gender-Based Violence Task Team filed a complaint with the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC). The DA’s dossier contains a series of shocking failures of state actors, to report and ultimately achieve criminal prosecutions of the rapists of children across South Africa.
The DA demands accountability for a catastrophic, systemic state failure that leaves South Africa’s most vulnerable children unprotected from sexual violence and rape.
When a girl under the age of 16 becomes pregnant, and presents to a clinician, a social worker or a police officer – it is often evidence of a serious crime: statutory rape. But in far too many cases the reporting and thereafter criminal investigation does not begin.
By law, healthcare workers, teachers, and social workers must report suspected sexual abuse immediately in terms of the Children’s Act (form 22) and Criminal Law. Yet, the DA’s countrywide investigation has exposed a horrifying breakdown in this safety net – a simple failure to complete forms and submit them.
Various state actors are failing to report, investigate, or prosecute these crimes – they are normalising statutory rape and letting abusers and rapists walk free.
The numbers are deeply disturbing:
– 122,302 adolescents gave birth in South Africa during the 2023/24 financial year.
– 2,716 of those were children between the ages of 10 and 14.
– In just the first half of 2025, 798 deliveries and 279 terminations were recorded for young girls aged 10 to 14.
Despite these staggering numbers, the police and social services are only tracking a tiny fraction of them.
For example, in the Eastern Cape, 396 girls under 14 gave birth between April and September 2024. Yet, only 16 cases were ever reported to the police.
This means hundreds of abusers remain free, often in the very households or neighbourhoods as the children they harmed.
This highlights a severe collapse of institutional coordination. This long-standing administrative failure directly violates the constitutional rights of our children to dignity and protection.
The DA has petitioned the SAHRC to:
1. Investigate these systemic failures across all responsible state departments.
2. Declare the ongoing neglect of these departments unconstitutional.
3. Order an immediate, unified data-tracking framework across government departments.
4. Enforce urgent accountability mechanisms for officials who fail to act.
The DA refuses to stay silent while administrative incompetence acts as an accessory to the abuse of our children. The DA will fight to ensure every government department does its job, upholds the law, and protects the children of South Africa