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Child malnutrition – human rights violation and slow violence against children

14 April 2021 | Story Dr Chantell Witten | Photo Supplied

A decade ago, Rob Nixon, a professor in the humanities and environment studies at Princeton University in the US, introduced the concept of slow violence in the context of climate change and environmentalism, explaining slow violence as violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence, at all. While profound, Professor Nixon’s concept of ”out-of-sight violence” and ”violence of delayed destruction” was challenged by Professor Thom Davies from the University of Nottingham in the UK who urged scholars to instead ask the question: ”out of sight to whom?” He argued that structural inequality mutated into noxious instances of immediate slow but pervasive violence by those who have endured toxic landscapes and unhealthy physical environments.

Reflecting on the impact of COVID-19 in the context of persistent hunger in South Africa’s cities, Dr Gareth Haysom from the University of Cape Town, challenged us as society to recognise the ”slow violence“ of hunger and food insecurity that are also often “experienced in private, incremental and accretive ways that are often invisible”. But as urged by Professor Davies, the question of child hunger and malnutrition in South Africa is really, to whom is this hunger and malnutrition invisible?

Malnutrition and its debilitating consequences have been studied and known about as far back as the 1950s. In 1976, Stoch and Smyth from the then Child Psychiatric Unit and Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Cape Town reported on a 15-year developmental study conducted from 1955 to 1970 on the effects of severe undernutrition during infancy on subsequent physical growth and intellectual functioning on coloured children from the Cape Flats concluded that the effects of severe undernutrition during infancy on subsequent brain growth and intellectual development confirmed gross retardation of intellect in the undernourished group when compared to the controls. Furthermore, the study concluded that given the abnormal performance of the control group that there was much evidence to suggest that the controls were also suboptimal in terms of nutritional status and intellectual functioning. This means that in general the nutritional status of coloured children on the Cape Flats was poor. Fast forward to 2021, and child nutrition in South Africa is still sub-optimal.

South Africa’s nutrition indicators have worsened

The most recent data from 2016 National Demographic Health Survey showed that 27% of children under the age of five years are stunted or too short for their age. This equates to more than 1.5 million children whose health and development is compromised and who have a lower chance of reaching their full potential even into their adult years. While many countries of the same economic development status have improved their nutrition indicators, South Africa’s nutrition indicators have worsened. South Africa has been identified as one of the countries with high levels of multiple forms of malnutrition manifested in high levels of stunting, childhood obesity and multiple micronutrient deficiencies, the most notable being vitamin A deficiency. These multiple forms of malnutrition cast a long shadow of ill-health and delayed development. of children, robbing them of quality of life and years of life in their childhood and their adult years. Malnutrition has a double cost on quality of life and additional health costs consuming resources that could have been spent on better food.

The right to have access to sufficient food is embedded in Section 26 and 27 of our Constitution and the right to adequate nutrition for children is stipulated in section 28. The Bill of Rights enshrined in the Constitution states that “every citizen has a right to have access to sufficient food, water and social security” and that “the State must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right”. Before the onslaught of COVID-19, we as health and social care professionals, have been acutely aware that a significant number of South Africans do not have access to sufficient food and go hungry on a daily basis. Malnutrition is well-documented in South Africa and unfortunately is progressively getting worse.

SA has not prioritised children or the realisation of their human rights to food and nutrition

Better nutrition can only be achieved when food and care are available to young children but in the context of rising food prices, limited maternal support and a difficult psychosocial environment, mothers are not able to provide their children with a health-enabling environment. Our high levels of stunting and obesity levels reflect the chronic situation of poor-quality and inadequate diets coupled with poor caring practices. While these poor dietary practices are often individualised and focused on mothers, there are many systemic and structural barriers for families to access affordable and nutritious diets. The food environment is shaped by a profit-centred food system that comes at the cost of people’s health and well-being. Children have always being the prime focus of the food industry, from the promotion of maternal supplements to improved maternal nutrition for the developing foetus, to the promotion of infant formula as a convenient and easy-to-use alternative to breastfeeding, to the manipulative marketing of foods for and to children.

Child nutrition has become a global tracking indicator for both human and economic development. Sadly, our lack of progress over the past 20 years clearly illustrates that we, as a country, have not prioritised children or the realisation of their human rights to food and nutrition. The findings of the 2020 Child Gauge gives us, as a country, the opportunity to stop the violations of children’s rights and to end the slow violence of child malnutrition.

News Archive

UFS responds to concerns around high costs of higher education

2015-10-15

Dear Students

UFS responds to concerns around high costs of higher education

There is an understandable and shared concern among students in the country around the high costs of higher education. As you know, this also is a matter of deep concern on our campuses, which the University of the Free State (UFS) has made a priority in discussions with student leaders - and through new strategies to relieve the burden of costs on poor students and their families. In fact, in the past two weeks, the UFS leadership has again engaged students on the matter of fees in the future.

This is what we have done so far. We have maintained our position as one of the universities with the lowest tuition fees in the country. As you would have seen from recent newspaper reports on the cost of a degree at various institutions over the past five years, the UFS has had consistently low fees. This is not an accident; both the University Council and the executive leadership of the UFS is of one mind that we must offer a high quality education at minimum cost to all our students, despite the rising costs of operating a large multi-campus university with 30 000 students. Our commitment to you is to continue to keep those costs to students as low as possible, without compromising on the quality of education.

In addition, we took a decision earlier this year to become the first university to drop application fees for first-year students. We are proud of that achievement, since so many students fall at this first hurdle as they contemplate post-school education and training. We also waived registration fees for postgraduate students and now Research Master’s and PhD students can study tuition free under certain conditions. We raised more than R60 million from the private sector to enable talented students, who do not receive NSFAS funding, to complete their degree studies at the UFS. We set aside some of the university’s own funds to enable even more students to access finance for their studies. And we now have a special office set aside to counsel and assist students to apply for more than one scholarship to support their studies. The university does not follow a policy of maximizing exclusions. It has endeavoured and succeeded to turn around the majority of its potential deregistration cases. During 2015 we had 2 700 students at the risk of being de-registered, but our serious efforts resulted in only over 200 instances of exclusion we could not mitigate. As is the practice for the past few years, these students’ debt for 2015 has been reversed.

But, we do not only look for funds from outside to support our students. Last year we set up a Staff Fund to which ordinary members of the academic and support staff can contribute from their own, and sometimes very modest, salaries to enable Kovsie students to finish their degrees. We have volunteers who work on the No Student Hungry (NSH) Bursary Programme to raise funds for students who cannot afford a regular meal. We have an open line to rural and township schools to nominate poor students with good results for support by the Rector’s Fund, and some of those students are now in their final year of studies. And many of our staff support individual students in their homes and with their families, without being asked to do so. This is what we call the Human Project and it remains central to the way in which we deal with students.

We will of course continue to make representation to government, the private sector, and individuals to increase funding, especially for first-generation students, and for families where more than one student is at university. We will continue to take to the road to raise funds from companies and foundations to finance our students. We will expand on-campus opportunities for limited working hours for students who wish to earn some money to support their studies. As we have said often before, no student who passes all their courses or modules will be turned away simply because they do not have the funds to study.

The UFS discusses and agrees to fee increases with our students well in advance of the next academic year. None of these decisions are taken without the agreement of the student leadership and thus far these engagements, while tough, have always been done in good faith and with the students’ interests at heart.

It is important for you to know that, with the declining government subsidy, in real terms, and the expanding needs of our students, we will not be able to keep the university running without fees - even though this source of revenue comes mainly through scholarships and bursaries. We need to compensate staff, purchase new library books and renew journal subscriptions (which is very difficult given the low value of the Rand), upgrade computers and software, pay rates and taxes, purchase laboratory equipment, pay the water and electricity bills, expand internet services, upgrade campus security, and hire more academics to keep class sizes reasonably small. It is important for you to know that the university has managed to avoid increasing student fees as a result of much higher municipal rates. Our lecturers are not the highest paid in the country and financially we run a tight ship. We consistently achieve unqualified audits and we are known to be one of the universities that manage its NSFAS contributions with great efficiency. We do this because of our commitment to ensure that our students are able to enjoy a high quality of education on a stable campus where there is a deep respect for all campus citizens.

Despite all these efforts, the most important message we wish to communicate, is that the door remains open for continued discussion with student leaders as we continue to find ways of keeping university education open and accessible to all qualifying students. At the same time, the UFS leadership is involved in discussions with government about how to best manage the escalating cost of higher education for our dents.

Thank you for your support and understanding at this time and be assured, once again, of our commitment to students as a matter of priority to the university leadership.

Best regards

Prof Jonathan Jansen
Vice-Chancellor and Rector

University of the Free State
19 October 2015

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