06 Dec 2017

Members of Parliament have supported a motion seeking to request government to consider creating a sexual predators and offenders registry and to ban sexual abuse offenders from working in institutions dealing with children.

Presenting the motion in Parliament, Specially Elected MP, Ms Bogolo Kenewendo said the nation could not standby and allow children’s rights to be trampled upon, as this did not only result in emotional abuse, but also led to long lasting physical and psychological effects.

Children’s rights, she said, was smart economics, adding that the matter needed to be deal with because its repercussions went far and beyond what happened in the victim’s body.

“It goes to the victim’s education, long term physical and mental health effects, work performance and increases the risk of adult aggression, violence, criminality- all of which affect our future productivity, economic development and prospects for economic transitioning,” she added.

Ms Kenewendo thanked MPs for supporting that Parliament’s order of business be suspended, and treat the motion as a matter of urgency in terms of National Assembly Standing Order 50. 1, which allows for Parliament proceedings to be suspended to allow for the discussion of a definite matter of urgent public importance.

“This can no longer continue and we, as the leadership of today, have to show that we take the honours and it’s our responsibility and we want to be that generation of leaders, the 11th Parliament, that stood and said they will protect the rights of children,” she said.

She said there was nothing ordinary about having five month old babies being raped by their fathers, nine-year-old girls getting raped by their mothers’ boyfriends and then killed afterwards or 762 mothers under the age of 16.

The Specially Elected MP also stressed that there was nothing ordinary about having a 10-year-old being a mother or over 22 per cent of children under the age of 16 having been forced to have sex or at least one young person in every classroom in Botswana having experienced some sort of sexual assault.

“There is nothing ordinary about that, and yet in the same breathe we have not seen anything, any real movement against those perpetrators. We seldom have these outcries. Last year there was an outcry, this year there is an outcry and the hype will last one week and then we go silent,” she added.

She expressed concern that “we have become a nation that protects offenders and have let go of our responsibilities of protecting children and its future generation. There is absolutely nothing ordinary about the times that we are going through.”

To address the matter, she said it was also important to start by setting the tone with a law that would expose sexual offenders and perpetrators.

Several countries in the world, she said, also have a sex offender registry, adding that within its system, Botswana also has different legal frameworks that called for protection of children and for safeguarding people’s security and their rights.

For that reason, she stressed that this was nothing new, “but just a call for us to step up.”

Responding to MPs’ debates in support of the motion, Ms Kenewendo said there was need for a full perpetrators list that cuts across adults and children, but not only one that looked at perpetrators against children.

“We need one that ties both perpetrators against adults and children so that we know how to fully protect ourselves and our children,” she added.

The purpose of the registry, she said was so that people were able to browse a full sexual perpetrators list and ensure that anyone in the record did not end up working in an institution dealing with children.

The current registry, as stipulated in the Children’s Act, Ms Kenewendo said, was limiting as it only focused on abuses against children and yet some of the sexual offenders were repeat offenders “and if they don’t say their discriminatory, they will only focus on children not adults.”

"They cut across, as such our legal frameworks, and our laws as well, should not be discriminatory and limiting, but capture the full extent of the situation," she added.

She called for all legal frameworks that protect the nation and children to be harmonised and consolidated to ensure that they worked for the people. ENDS