JENNIFER KESTIS FERGUSON

If you hear the scream break the door down!

I have been unable to do much the past day. My body feels heavy, as though grief itself has weight. I have lit candles, prayed for a four-year-old girl I never knew — Nikita from Eldorado Park — and for her little brother, and for a community so fractured that no one could stop what was happening inside that locked Zozo hut.

I have listened to the recording of her screams. Three minutes of pure terror. Her small voice begging:

‘Asseblief Pappie… nee Pappa!’

“Please, Daddy… please don’t, Daddy…”

A tiny four-year old begging for her life.

She was raped. Beaten. Thrown onto the ceiling of the shack. Eventually drowned. All of this while her two-year-old brother — whose ribs and arms had already been broken by the same man — was watching.

Her mother knew. She had known before. She had withdrawn charges.

The neighbours heard. One recorded. They stood outside for four hours. The police were called. They arrived four hours later.

A Zozo hut is barely bigger than a storage shed. Thin walls. A single lock on the door. You hear everything. That day it became a torture chamber, a coffin before death.

I have tried to understand how you could stand outside that thin wall, hearing a child plead for her life, and not break the door down. Not smash the window. Not scream until someone came. The passivity of it.

I have tried to understand a police force that can take four hours to respond to a child’s rape in progress.

I have tried to understand a mother who can hand her children back to a man she knows is raping them.

In my mind I keep returning to the image of the grandmother. Small, fine Nama features. Standing before a news camera, her scarred-faced son translating. She thanks the community. Thanks the media. She calls her daughter Meidjie — a word that in Afrikaans history has been used to belittle, here used as endearment.

When asked about Nikita’s dying, she says simply: “Nou is sy in ‘n beter plek… met die Here.” Now she’s in a better place with the Lord.

Her voice is calm, almost disconnected. There is no condemnation, no demand for justice. Only the saintly resignation of a theology that preaches suffering as holy, meekness as virtue, endurance as grace.

I waited for her outrage. To mirror mine. It did not come.

And that absence of rage shocks me almost as much as the crime.

But the more I sit with it, the more I see that Nikita’s death — her three minutes of recorded agony — has given us something we would rather not receive: the unfiltered truth of what is happening in our country every day, mostly unseen, unreported, unnamed.

South Africa is in the grip of a child abuse epidemic:

58 children are sexually abused every day — and that’s only the reported cases.

In one three-month period in 2021, 352 children were murdered — four every day.

One-third of our teens have been sexually abused; for most, the perpetrator was someone they knew.

Over 95% of child sexual abuse cases never reach the police!!!!

This violence lives in our homes, not just on dark street corners. It is carried out by fathers and mothers, stepfathers, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters. It grows in the soil of poverty, joblessness, fractured masculinity, addiction to drugs like nyaope and crystal meth. It is shielded by silence — by mothers who withdraw charges, by neighbours who “don’t want to get involved,” by police who collude with drug dealers.

We talk about “it takes a village to raise a child.” But what happens when the village looks away? When the Zozo hut stands in the middle of the community and no one kicks the door down?

This is not normal and must never be normal.

Now is the time to:

Declare child protection a national emergency with the same urgency as a health pandemic.

Implement rapid response protocols for all child abuse reports — measured in minutes, not hours.

Fund and train more social workers and community child protection officers in high-risk areas.

Enforce mandatory reporting of suspected abuse by any adult, with legal penalties for silence.

Investigate and remove police officers colluding with drug dealers.

Establish community child watch groups with direct lines to independent crisis responders.

To the Minister of Police: four hours to respond to a child being raped is four hours too long.

To the Minister of Social Development: there is no excuse for returning a raped child  to her abuser.

To Parliament: pass the legislation, fund the services, protect the whistleblowers.

To every citizen: if you hear the scream, you break the door down.

If Nikita’s scream does not change us, nothing will.