To be a professional in the human services field, one must be prepared to face numerous challenges and adversities. One challenge that all human services workers are guaranteed to face is the lack of resources. Whether there is an insufficient amount of money or not enough programs to help those in need, this challenge is prevalent worldwide. As a previous intern at the Department of Juvenile Justice in Graham, North Carolina, this issue provided for daily discussion. One of the major needs that I observed was that there was no drug treatment program for juveniles. Children in the United States are being looked past daily in their time of need.
This issue of lack of resources is taken to an entirely new level in South Africa. I was fortunate enough to intern at the Bonneytoun Place of Safety for 3 days. This residential program provides a secured place for boys between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, awaiting trial. Most boys that reside there are either re-offenders or have committed a serious crime that puts the community at risk and therefore are not allowed to return to their home. The average stay for these children are a few weeks to a few months, although some only reside there for a night while others have been there for years. This all depends on the severity of individual cases and their trial dates.
On the first day I took a tour of the facility, and what I saw rather shocked me. We first went to the dorms. Bonneytoun holds 190 boys with 21 boys in each dorm. When we entered the first dorm, I tried to mask my raw reaction. The facility was dirty, there were broken windows, and things seemed extremely unorganized. There were boys running around in their underwear while hosing each other with water, others were wrestling with each other, while some boys kept to themselves. For each dorm there was either one or two staff per each dorm. That was when I first realized that a major issue was lack of staffing. It is impossible to organize a group of twenty-one adolescent boys with only one or two staff members. To better describe the boys’ living conditions, there were four large rooms. One was an empty room with a television, one room consisted of a bathroom, while the last two were lined with cots for the boys to sleep in. One problem that a staff member discussed with us is that rape is a frequent occurrence among the boys. This is because the boys do not have separate cells or living quarters. They are not segregated based on their crime but by their age and physical size. Therefore, those who commit murder or rape are mixed in with the general population and this puts those who are in Bonneytoun for lesser crimes at risk. Another reason why rape occurs is due to the lack of staffing. With at the most two staff members working a 12 hour shift, rape is unfortunately a reality for these boys. A specific situation where a boy was raped in June was just addressed last week. The boy would urinate in his bed and when this pattern was noticed by the staff the boy discussed his rape while going to the bathroom in June. With this lack of staffing, boys are slipping through the cracks and some must sustain lifelong trauma because of it.
Education also seemed to be an unaddressed issue during my internship. The boys go to school Monday to Thursday for only a few hours a day. My supervisor said that most boys have already dropped out of school and that school for a full day would not interest them. I found this extremely concerning. How can a child push themselves when no one gives them any hope or believes in them? Class size also makes educating the juveniles a struggle. When these boys are in large classes, they are easily overlooked and are unable to learn at their full potential.
Next, around thirty-five percent of the boys at Bonneytoun are there for drug problems. After the boys go to trial, follow-up programs are not sustained from Bonneytoun. There is no drug rehabilitation facility for these boys and if there was not many of them could afford it. Without programs for these children the probability that the juvenile will go back to drugs is high. How can this cycle be broken? Many of these children turn to drugs because of their experience as street children or because they have been exposed to gang life. Gangs provide a home for children who do not have a support system, and the only way to break this cycle is through drug education prevention programs as well as gang prevention programs. Again, these programs are luxuries and are not available for juveniles at this time.
Bonneytoun and its employees do the best they can with their limited resources. With a case load of more than forty boys social workers cannot pay attention to every child. Dorm staff cannot control the boys when they are severely out-numbered. Although this blog criticizes the lack of resources to those in need in South Africa I do not want to overlook those who are fighting for these boys. Every single staff member that I met at Bonneytoun wants to help these boys. They see these children as just that, children and not criminals. These boys live in a society that forces them to grow up so quickly that at times I believe they lose much of their childhood. Although the staff does not have much to give them regarding their facility they do give the boys a sense of caring. That is what some of those juveniles need, someone to love them, and that is in abundance in Bonneytoun.
South Africa is in the middle of a historical transformation where numerous things need to change and are in the process of doing so. Topics such as education will be addressed, and this in turn will directly affect the clients that Bonneytoun deals with. By educating the youth of South Africa, they will have a bigger and better opportunity to succeed as people and as a society. This will also touch upon the staff that will be working at Bonneytoun. With educated staff members new ideas and a better organized facility will be in place. I have faith that this country-wide transformation will address the cracks in the human services field in South Africa to help rehabilitate those who need it.
Stephanie Badavas
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
-Ghandi
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