GONTSE MADUMO | We call them monsters, but who taught them to be one? - TimesLIVE
When babies arrive, they arrive as blank canvases.
Parents, families, communities, schools, churches, culture and society all pick up the brush. We paint our ideas about religion, morality, gender, success, failure, power, love and what it means to be a “good” boy or a “good” girl. We teach them what to believe, how to behave, who to respect, what to fear and, increasingly, what it means to survive.
And then, when some of them grow into adults we do not recognise, we call them monsters.
But what if, sometimes, we are looking at the finished product and refusing to acknowledge the hands that helped create it?
That is the uncomfortable question we need to ask ourselves.
South Africa is a country where the circumstances of your birth can profoundly shape the trajectory of your life. The postcode you are born into can determine the quality of your education, your exposure to violence, your access to opportunity and, ultimately, the choices available to you.
A child growing up in poverty becomes aware of poverty very early. They see what others have. They understand what they do not have. They experience the humiliation, frustration and hopelessness that can come with being locked out of opportunity.
Of course, poverty does not make someone a criminal. Millions of South Africans live in poverty without committing crimes.
But we cannot pretend that circumstances do not shape behaviour.
When legitimate pathways to dignity, security and economic mobility feel increasingly out of reach, some people become more vulnerable to the alternatives that society offers them. Crime can become attractive not because people are born wanting to hurt others, but because environments can make destructive choices feel possible, profitable or even necessary.
And this brings me back to the blank canvas.
We often talk about crime as though criminals simply appeared.
They were taught something about power, conflict, love, respect and violence long before they committed their first crime.
We cannot explain every crime through childhood. We cannot blame parents for every adult decision. Human beings have agency, and people make choices.
Consider something we often call discipline.
When a child is beaten from a young age, what are we actually teaching them?
We may say we are teaching obedience. We may say we are teaching respect. We may say, “I was beaten and I turned out fine.”
But beneath the lesson is another message: when someone has done something wrong, violence is an acceptable way to resolve it. When you are bigger and more powerful than someone else, you may use that power to make them behave.
Children do not only listen to what we say.
If violence is the language spoken in their homes, if aggression is how conflict is resolved, if humiliation is how authority is exercised, then we should not be surprised when violence becomes part of the language they speak as adults.
This does not absolve anyone of responsibility for their actions.
A person who rapes, murders or steals must be held accountable for that act. Victims deserve justice. Society has a right to protect itself.
But accountability cannot begin at the prison gate.
Because by the time we are calling someone a murderer, rapist or thief, there may have been years of lessons, experiences, deprivation, violence, neglect, modelling and social conditioning that preceded that moment.
We cannot explain every crime through childhood. We cannot blame parents for every adult decision. Human beings have agency, and people make choices.
But neither can we pretend that people are created in a vacuum.
We participate in the making of the people we later condemn.
Perhaps the question is not simply, “What is wrong with these people?”
And, perhaps most importantly, what are we teaching the children who are growing up today?
If we want different adults, perhaps we need to start by raising different children.
The babies arriving today are still blank canvases.
The question is what we choose to paint on them.
