Crime in South Africa: The Other Side of the Equation

We are accustomed to reading about crime every day, lamenting about it and criticising the police, security companies, and government, of course. But do we ever ask Why is there so much crime, what is causing so many people to turn to crime in South Africa? This article offers a few suggestions, looking at probable causes.

We have a very high unemployment rate in our country, and we need to look beyond the statistics to the consequences of so many people with so much time on their hands, especially young people. The bulk of prisoners are males between the ages of 18 and 35, which is normally a dangerous period for males, as they seek to assert themselves and their masculinity in ways which are often anti-social, if there is no meaningful work for them to do. A professor of sociology has referred to what he calls the “barbarian invasion” in the USA, meaning by that the assault on society by males between this age group. It appears that marriage and children draw males out of the danger zone, but with marriage a dwindling institution and more single parenting, there are more rootless males around, turning to crime, anti-social behaviour and substance abuse.

There are too many youths in South Africa whose parents cannot afford even to maintain them at school. Living conditions are also conducive to fostering an anti-social bias. These youths may drift into gangs, or may fruitlessly seek employment, and may watch with growing bitterness the river of people going to work every morning and returning every evening.

A feeling of powerlessness in engendered, and psychologists believe that such people may seek to compensate by exerting power over weaker people, including women and children. It is not too difficult to imagine that the socialisation of many people living in dehumanised conditions produces people with anti-social morals, anger and frustration. These turn naturally to crime, and often to violent crime.

I have encountered a good few highly dehumanised individuals in the townships, people who seem to have had all the milk of human kindness eradicated from their personalities. Yes, these people do make choices, moral choices, but I wonder what my choices would be like if I had been brought up in a dehumanised environment.

When business bemoans crime, is not business part of the problem (and part of the solution), contributing to the very conditions that cause crime? We complacently accept what economists call “structural unemployment”, as if it is an unavoidable evil. I am not advocating socialism, Marxism, or communism, but I believe business has to be more creative in our country, with its free market system. I have heard of businessmen sacrificing some profit (imagine that!) by choosing labour rather than machinery. France reduced the working week by about 20% and so created hundreds of thousands of jobs, cannot business do something similar? Business is highly creative, there are surely many more ways of ameliorating the situation. The formal economy can also play its part.

In Cape Town, Mrs Linda Biehl (an American citizen) set up the Amy Biehl Foundation, after her daughter Amy was tragically killed in Gugulethu, Cape Town. The foundation recognises the culture of violence in townships and sets out to provide meaningful activity for youth in these areas.

The image of a “ticking time bomb” is often used to describe the dangers of massive unemployment. But the bomb has detonated, we are paying the consequences of this unhappy feature of our economy. People are struggling for survival, as we can see from the country-wide service delivery protests. There is also a steady process of urbanisation, which is also putting huge, in fact unbearable strains on cities. We are not alone in this. Peru, for example, also experiences this problem, has land invasions, informal settlements, mini-busses, crime, unemployment.

We have to stop looking at one side of the equation only, we are both part of the problem as well as part of the solution.