Minister, can you hear the alarm bells of child killings?

With our history, it is understandable that society has become inured to many kinds of violence: home invasions, road-rage assaults and even cold-blooded murders such as those of yachtsman Rob Meek and artist Clinton de Menezes this week.

We take note, express opprobrium and move on, secretly grateful that it happened to someone else.

But when it hits the children, we all suddenly feel personally touched by the hideousness of the crimes.

The murders of the four Mantsho children and their mother, Rebecca, in Polokwane and Jasmin-Lee Pretorius's rape and murder in Brakpan are such crimes. In most cases, our reactions are evidence of our humanity in the face of grim provocation; in others, it reveals a blood lust among us.

The demonstrations outside Jasmin-Lee's home this week and the petulant outbursts at her memorial service on Friday smacked more of revenge than sympathy.

There was an element of the lynch mob on both occasions. Again, this is understandable, and at least level heads prevailed.

Despite open threats against Jasmin-Lee's killer, there was no overt violence. We should be grateful for these mercies in times of great sadness, and also outrage.

Against the backdrop of this public reaction, it becomes vital not only for due legal process to take place, but also for any rush to judgment to be avoided.

Jasmin-Lee's mother needed a police escort to reach the block of flats where her child's father lived and where Jasmin-Lee was attacked, murdered and her little body callously hidden. Her father had to move out after threats to burn down his home.

There has been no evidence of neglect by either parent, whose anguish was genuine when they spoke to the media this week.

Nevertheless, the focus, and sometimes the blame, after any child killing is on the parents, whether guilty - as appears to be the case of a Limpopo security guard who shot dead his two stepdaughters before being killed himself in a shootout with police this week - or innocent, as in the case of Jasmin-Lee. If our children are vulnerable, it is often a case not so much of neglect as of desperation.

Too many of our children face gruelling ordeals to merely survive.

Single mothers, even grandmothers, are left to fend as best they can with children over whom control is often impossible.

An extreme case was revealed recently in an Al Jazeera documentary on the children of Zimbabwe, often Aids orphans, who face brutalisation as they attempt to escape their benighted lives by fleeing to South Africa. One child worked for eight months to accumulate the $50 to pay an unscrupulous smuggler to help him cross the border.

The Limpopo tragedies, as well as the one in Chatsworth, Durban, where a father allegedly killed his teenage children this week, have all the signs of desperation.

The men - and it is almost always a man - involved in such killings have been driven to these horrendous acts by a tradition of bottling up emotions and then being unable to deal with them. Perhaps here is a way for authorities to intervene.

The Minister for Women, Children and People with Disabilities, Lulu Xingwana, has made little headway with the problem despite holding many "weeks of awareness of violence".

Until she and her department can come to grips with what seems to be another outbreak of family killings, she will be regarded as just another deadbeat minister.

But it did not need the recent murders to remind us of the problem.

In August, the World Health Organisation estimated that the rate of child homicide in South Africa was more than double the global average. It that was not a wake-up call to Xingwana, this week's events must surely be.