OPINION: If we do not attend to all aspects of children's wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic, it will have long-lasting consequences, says The Children's Institute at UCT. ChildProtectionWeek2020
Cape Town – The Covid-19 pandemic is stripping families and communities of the resources they need to protect children. Lockdown measures have confined people to their homes in the hope of curbing the spread of the virus and saving lives, but this has led to joblessness, poverty and isolation from protective social networks.
For the over 17 million grant beneficiaries, some relief arrived in early May when they received their first top-ups. Twelve million children on the Child Support Grant received an extra R300 each, taking their grants to R740, and the 350,000 children in foster care and 155,000 children with severe disabilities, received a R250 top-up – taking their grants to R1,290 and R2,110 respectively.
Evidence from the Harvard Centre for the Developing Child shows that extreme poverty, malnutrition, violence and/or neglect can - in the absence of care and protection - give rise to toxic stress, causing lasting damage to the developing brain and leading to adverse outcomes such as aggressive and antisocial behaviour across the life course. In other words, early exposure to adversity drives an intergenerational cycle of poverty, malnutrition, violence and ill-health.
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