As the trial against Gerhard Ackerman, an alleged child sex-ring kingpin, takes shape in the Johannesburg high court this week, it potentially brings about an end to a scarring chapter for scores of young boys who fell victim to him. The court heard this week how he allegedly groomed the boys — most of whom came from dysfunctional families — for the pleasure of men who were willing pay money for sexual encounters with children.
He was arrested in 2021, while his co-accused, a man of the law, Adv Paul Kennedy, committed suicide last year as the harrowing allegations against the two of them came to the fore.
While at the end of this trial, if found guilty, Ackerman may spend the rest of his life behind bars, the greatest concern is that he is just one of scores of alleged paedophiles who have preyed on children — some of whom we allow and pay to be in our children’s lives in the form of educators.
This week, we ran two horrific stories about teachers who were implicated in sex crimes against children but were simply given a slap on the wrist and dismissed from their jobs instead of being brought to book.
In the one story, a school principal WhatsApped a grade 9 girl on a Saturday night, telling her they were going to have sex. After the 15-year-old showed Frederick Booyse’s messages to her mother, he was fired from Aurora High School, near Piketberg in the Western Cape. The 53-year-old then lost an appeal to the education MEC, and now his plea for clemency has been rejected by an arbitrator.
The efforts we have made as a country by introducing aspects such as the sex offender registry have proven to be fruitless.
Gail McEwan of the Education Labour Relations Council said Booyse pleaded guilty to sexually harassing the pupil in dozens of messages sent over an hour, but his remorse “was all about him, his future and the fact that he was unemployed”. She added: “He never once mentioned the impact of his behaviour on the girl, other learners or the reputation of the school.”
In another story, we wrote of a teacher whose life was threatened after she blew the whistle on her colleague at Phakamisani Primary School in Plettenberg Bay, who was sexually assaulting girls as young as 10, even promising to take them on honeymoon to a Cape Town hotel.
The “alleged” sex pest who had said in a disciplinary hearing that he was showing love to the children, refused to apologise and was subsequently fired but never criminally charged. Instead, he allegedly put out a hit on the whistle-blowing colleague.
We need to do more to protect our children, especially when sex pests such as these remain free and outside the confines of the justice system.
Even those in the justice system are not entirely contained.
This as the efforts we have made as a country by introducing aspects such as the sex offender registry have proved fruitless.
The registry is not open to the public and is kept confidential. While scores of people are added there every year, it is a drawn-out process that requires an application to check whether a person in question is listed on the registry.
Currently, only employers in the public or private sector from schools, crèches and hospitals have the access to the registry, but a layman wanting to hire a person — perhaps to tutor a child — is currently not given such an avenue.
If anything, the way in which the laws around the sex registry are structured, it protects the privacy and upholds the rights of the perpetrator of such crimes rather than the victim and allows sex pests to simply move from one place to the other without much trouble.
It is time for the legal justice system to hammer the nail in the coffin of sexual predators by not just bringing them to book but by exposing them too.
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