INSTITUTIONALIZED CHILD CARE IN URBAN SOUTH AFRICA

Hygiene, Natural and Logical Consequences, Conflict Resolution, Sexual Abuse, and
Good and Bad Games and Touches. The latter two courses stood out to me as evident of
the sexual abuse rate. Nancy confirmed that sexual education was important for even the
toddlers, as many of them have had negative exposure.
I was unable to attend any of these clinics, or any of the group counseling sessions,
during my time in South Africa, but I gathered that these were largely corrective
therapies, designed to intervene with very particular challenges such as language delays
or defiant outbursts. I was able to ask Sarah Sunker, the center’s manager and Pastor
Mike’s daughter in law about what she considered to be the children’s biggest
psychological need. She answered that it was learning how to cope with a traumatic past.
Many kids had come from extremely traumatic backgrounds. Nancy’s explanation of the
sexual education program for the center included conversations with some of the
youngest kids, as many of them had been sexually abused in the past. One of the few
interventions offered was the Teddy Bear Clinic, attended by the center’s youngest
children as post-abuse counseling.
In spite of the range of supportive interventions, many of the children did not seem
very encouraged to wholly process their past. “Many of them are told [by family
members and peers] ‘why are you thinking about those negative things? It’s in the past,’”
Sarah Sunker explained. “A lot of them end up avoiding having to process the difficult
things that happened to them.” This explanation made sense of the affect of the children I
interacted with, which was often happy and contented, but not always wholly engaged. I
suspected that the repression of negative thoughts was a cultural norm, and when I asked
Marc, he confirmed. “That’s right, that’s right,” he reflected. “They say that if it makes
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