But South Africa (SA) does not cherish her children, in spite of their right to care and protection, enshrined in our Constitution's Bill of Rights. Of course this failure occurs in a milieu of social tolerance of use of force and violence in the country as a whole, with high levels of family violence in the home, violence in the community, and violence at the hands of police and in schools (with frequent resort to corporal punishment[1]). Children from poorer households and from rural areas are particularly affected.[2] An editorial in this issue of SAMJ[3]informs us of the SA position in relation to other countries around the world in the Global Status Report on Violence Prevention 2014,[4] jointly released by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Izindaba[5]features the harsh lives of SA's children in this issue. 'The risky lives of South Africa's children: Why so many die or are traumatised' reveals that 80% of children live in informal settlements ('danger-filled environments'), and because of the widespread, tragic absence of the most effective risk-mitigating factor possible - their biological parents - they are highly vulnerable.

Children need adults who will cherish them and on whom they can depend for love, care and, most of all, protection. But many of SAs children are not raised within the conventional nuclear family ... 14.6 million of our 18.5 million children have both parents known to be alive, according to Statistics South Africa's General Household Survey of 2010,[1] only 6.0 million (one in three) aged under 18 years live with both their mother and father, 2.3 million have a mother alive but father deceased or unknown, 0.7 million have father alive but mother deceased or unknown, and 0.9 million have both parents either deceased or unknown. Of 12.4 million children in single-parent homes, the majority live with their mother, a fraction with their father, and the remainder with neither parent.