SAMKE MNGUNI | We honour the youth of 1976, but we must remember they were children

We picture the rows of schoolchildren walking out of their classrooms in Soweto and the image of 12-year-oldHector Pietersonbeing 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 often think about that small slip, from child to youth. 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.

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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’schild protectionfigures as proof 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.

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