Woman have historically played an important role in the promotion of children’s rights, worldwide. In the United States of America, it two women, Lucy Flower and Julia Lathrop, drafted the first separate law that recognised that child offenders should be treated differently from adults. But these two women did not have the vote, and thus had to give their pioneering law to a man who got it passed by the US Congress in 1899. In 1920, just after the first world war, Eglantyne Jebb established the organisation Save the Children at the Albert Hall in London. She went on to draft the first Declaration on the Rights of the Child at the League of Nations in 1924. Jebb died in Geneva at a relatively young age in 1928, which was the year that her British sisters were permitted to vote on an equal footing with men for the first time. She herself never had the chance to vote in an election.

South Africa’s history boasts equally impressive women who fought for children’s rights. Recent historical accounts by Thembeka Ngcukaitobi and Zubeida Jaffer have breathed new life into Charlotte Maxeke’s early years when she travelled with a choir to England (1891-92) where she met suffragette Emily Pankhurst, and her graduation with a BSc from Wiberforce University in the United States in 1901. Less known is the fact that the multi-talented Maxeke was South Africa’s first black probation officer, and also served simultaneously as a child welfare officer in Johannesburg from 1923. According to Jaffer, she worked with “waifs and strays and destitute children”, and was credited with having “done considerable work in the alleviation of the causes of crime in the city”. However, she was discharged in 1929, and according to education historian Linda Chisholm, “the relinquishing of her services [was] a sign of both cost-cutting exercises in the context of the great depression, as well as the steadily hardening segregationist programme of non-recognition of the right of Africans to be in urban areas”.  Maxeke, like her Western counterparts, worked on child rights issues some years before white women got the vote in 1930. Despite working on the campaign for women’s suffrage with women of all races, Maxeke herself was never able to cast a ballot – not because of her gender, but because of her race. She died in 1939.

Another South African woman, who did get the vote in 1930, was Leila Reitz. Having obtained the right to vote, Reitz stood for Parktown and was the first woman elected to the South African Parliament in 1933. She served as a member of a government committee established in 1934 called the Inter-Departmental Committee on Destitute, Neglected and Delinquent Children and Young Persons.  The Committee’s terms of reference included the instruction to “consider whether it is desirable and practicable to dispense with criminal procedure in dealing with juvenile and/or juvenile-adult delinquents, and instead to deal with them paternally, on the lines of the procedure adopted in administering the Children’s Protection Act”. The Committee recommended far reaching changes in the form of a Young Offenders Bill and a Children’s Bill. The Committee’s report of1937 made a remarkable statement for its time: “The draft bills submitted by the Committee make no distinction on racial grounds.  The principles underlying the treatment of children ‘in need of care’ or of delinquents are of equal validity whether the children to whom they apply are of one race or another.” In an impassioned speech to Parliament Mrs Reitz said: “I want to make it clear to the House that if we do not bring in a comprehensive measure such as I have outlined, we shall fall very short indeed not only of what other countries have achieved, but certainly of what must be done in this country.” The Young Offenders Bill did not pass, despite the work put into it by reformers. That opportunity was missed, and South Africa entered a long period of stagnation and deterioration in the field of child offenders’ rights, which lasted over 40 years. It wasn’t until 1995 that the Mandela government ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child and put in motion a process for the drafting of South Africa’s first separate piece of legislation for child offenders – the Child Justice Act - which was finally passed by South Africa’s first democratic Parliament in 2010.

• Professor Ann Skelton is the Director of the Centre for Child Law, University of Pretoria. She chaired the SA Law Reform committee that drafted the Bill which culminated in the Child Justice Act. She is currently a member of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Photo source:  https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/charlotte-nee-manye-maxeke