About this site

About this publication

childjustice.org.za is an independent online magazine about how South Africa treats its children: the law that is supposed to protect them, the harm that law exists to prevent, and the sport, art and play that childhood is actually made of.

Why this domain, and what came before

For most of two decades this address was a documentary resource on one subject: the campaign to give children in conflict with the law a statute of their own, and then the implementation of the Child Justice Act 75 of 2008. That archive — the bill, its text, the parliamentary record, the public submissions, the research reports — is still here, in full, at /archive/. Nothing has been deleted to make room for the magazine.

What we have added is the rest of the subject. A children’s rights publication that only covers courtrooms describes a small and unhappy fraction of childhood. The Convention on the Rights of the Child devotes an article to rest, play, recreation and cultural life; South African schools argue every year about whether sport and art are affordable. So the magazine has five sections: Rights & Law, Protection, Sport, Arts and Play.

How we work

Reference, not news cycle. We write pieces meant to be as useful next year as this one: how a process works, what a rule requires, what the evidence says. We do not chase daily stories.
Named sources and checkable facts. Statutes are cited by number and year. Where a figure is contested, we say so instead of picking the convenient one.
Photographs are real. Pictures come from Wikimedia Commons and comparable free archives, and the photographer and licence are printed under the image, the way a newspaper credits a picture. We do not publish identifiable photographs of children in connection with abuse, offending or court proceedings.
Advertising is labelled. Paid placements say so at the top of the page and their outbound links are marked rel="sponsored". They are not edited by us and do not influence what we cover.

We are not the Child Justice Alliancechildjustice.org.za is an independent magazine that happens to hold this domain. The Child Justice Alliance is a separate, living coalition coordinated by the Dullah Omar Institute at the University of the Western Cape; nothing here is written on its behalf, and requests addressed to it cannot be answered or forwarded from this site. Its own work is published at dullahomarinstitute.org.za.

Reach the editors through the contact page.