Many cases of abuse take place within families. As a result, the cases of reported abuse are only a small percentage of all the abuse that children face in South Africa. Keeping this in mind, the statistics of child abuse is astonishing. In 1996, the Child Protection Unit of South African Protection Services alone dealt with 35,838 cases of crimes against children. In 1996, the Child Welfare Societies dealth with 9,398 cases a month involving severe neglect, or physical, or sexual abuse.

Violence in South Africa is more apparent with non-white children, particularly for female children and adolescents. Child massacres, rape, abuse, and gang wars are things that happen often. Since children are being introduced to such bad physical behavior, the social development of children will suffer.

Another violence that is reocurring in South Africa is sexual violence. In 1999, South Africa started a movement against all forms of sexual violence, focusing on rape. In South Africa, many young girls are forced to stay quiet while they are being raped because it is happening in their homes by their own fathers. In fact, statistics show that a South African woman is raped every 8.3 seconds. This is the highest occurance in the world, according to the Guiness Book of World Records. This is one record that I am sure that they are not proud of.

Vera Haller wrote an article for the USA Today in 1999 named "South Africans Cry for Justice in Rape Crisis." In this article, she illustrated several horrible examples of violence in the lives of young South African girls. She stated that in one particular weekend, the body of a 6 year old rape victim was found in a shallow grave, a 14 year old girl was gang-raped, stabbed 42 times, and slashed across the throat, and finally, 19 other female teenagers reported of being raped. This is extremely way too many instances of child violence, especially since it all took place in one weekend. Haller also said that the 14 year old girl was raped by her father. Since it was her dad, he only received 7 years in prison because he was not seen as a threat to society. This should have never happened. The law states that children must be protected from violence, but this does not seem to occur.

In South Africa, girls are taught that male violence is the conidition against which their rights and freedoms are negotiated. Therefore, these girls learn that submission is necessary to survival and that the laws in the Children's Charter are not upheld.