The police officer takes a simplistic view of a very complex matter ("The desperate women who kidnap babies", yesterday).

These women are not merely protecting "love relationships", as he calls them.

In African culture, barrenness still carries a stigma. There are derogatory names for such women.

A married woman who cannot give birth to an heir is often maligned by her husband's family and society in general.

She has to live with the constant threat that if she cannot produce a child soon, her husband will be forced to take another wife who will.

If she is in a polygamous marriage, like Hannah in the Bible, she will be taunted by the other wives.

Consequently, you will find that most of the perpetrators are married women.

The man's fertility is seldom questioned.

Adoption is not an option as it is believed that the child is born spiritually linked to rituals peculiar to that ancestry, and a cross-pollination of rituals will anger the child's ancestors and cause all sorts of misfortunes for the child, including sickness and disease.

In the quest for progeny, these women are shunted from one traditional healer to another "for treatment".

The success rate of this treatment is not known as it is rumoured that a wily sangoma, who suspects the husband may be the one afflicted with infertility, surreptitiously assists by donating his own sperm, but I digress.

Thus, desperate to maintain their dignity and monogamous marriages, they then make false claims of pregnancy and, in order to carry it through, resort to this most heinous crime.