Jackie Branfield

Jackie Branfield is tackling the alarming increase in child sexual abuse cases in South Africa head on by mobilizing communities to make the criminal justice system accountable, demand swift prosecution of perpetrators, and ensure that victims are treated sensitively while also addressing their high risk of HIV infection.

In recent years, South Africa has witnessed an alarming increase in the reported cases of sexual abuse of children—and there are countless more that go unreported. Recognizing that children have no safe way to express their experience, given the social taboos around discussing bodies, Jackie came up with an answer: she designed a simple stuffed toy called “Bobbi Bear.” At the point of rescue, the Bobbi Bear is combined with counseling methods to target and obtain forensic evidence in a quick and non-threatening manner. This enables law enforcement officials to gather consistent facts for the legal case and also helps to determine whether or not the child is at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS without causing any unnecessary psychological stress to the child.
Now when an abused child needs to tell law enforcement officials exactly what happened to them for the legal record, he or she has a teddy bear to use as a prop—providing consistent facts for a legal case and avoiding unnecessary additional psychological stress for the child.
Jackie seeks to involve citizens—long silent and disempowered about the issue—to fight the growing trend of child abuse within their own communities. To this end, she is training volunteers to exercise their rights and demand that law enforcement officials adhere to the first law in the South African Children’s Charter of the Constitution: to protect children. To Jackie’s credit, the toy is becoming a recognized symbol; when police, nurses and court officials see a child holding a Bobbi Bear, they know that a citizen advocate is accompanying the child and demanding justice on his or her behalf.

Cases of child sexual abuse in South Africa are both becoming more prevalent and increasingly happening to younger children. A number of theories have been offered to explain this trend, but there is general consensus that the nation’s deepening poverty is the root cause. In poor families, women are the primary caregivers, but economic survival often requires they be away from their children all day working or looking for food. It is very common for children to be cared for by strangers or otherwise unreliable people—making them incredibly vulnerable to sexual assault. The increasing numbers of children orphaned by AIDS exacerbates the problem.
Medical professionals and scholars have also identified a common myth as the primary cause for the rise in abuse: Many people mistakenly believe the idea that engaging in intercourse with virgins will cure them of the HIV/AIDS virus. As a result, in a number of highly publicized cases in 2001 and early 2002, the public was horrified to learn that babies as young as eight months old were assaulted. These shocking reports have elicited deep soul-searching in South Africa—and much anger. The preferred and popular response has been one of indignation and a demand that the government prosecute perpetrators. While an important step, this attitude means that until now communities have not taken full responsibility for dealing with the problem, choosing instead to look to outsiders for solutions.
To make matters worse, South Africa’s current legal system lacks sufficient staff and resources, so law enforcement officers are unable to fully respond to the increasing abuse rate. Poor training only aggravates the trauma of sexual assault; scarce knowledge of how to handle sexual abuse cases means questioning methods border on secondary abuse. The common practice is for police officers—usually men who may speak a different vernacular from the children—to take the victims into a back room apart from their mothers and ask them to show on their own bodies what happened to them. Reliving the experience is not only extremely traumatic and abusive, but also breaks a taboo for children who have been taught not to talk about their private parts.
Compounding the problem is an utter lack of coordinated counseling services for children who have been sexually abused. The system is set up to fail; whereas it would be useful to have trained counselors on staff at the front desk when children arrive, most police stations do not even provide these services. If they do, trauma rooms are located next door to police stations and staffed by volunteers who are instructed not to interfere with “police protocol” unless invited—even if they see a child being mistreated.
Jackie has also observed great inconsistencies in information gathering. Official forms crucial to prosecuting perpetrators are often not filled out properly—if at all—and are frequently lost. Moreover, the South African Police Service’s Child Protection Unit will only intervene in a case if three specific criteria are fulfilled: the crime is reported to them within 24 hours of taking place, the child is under twelve years old, and there are visible signs of violent rape. By making it so difficult to properly report an assault case, it is little wonder that abusers are rarely charged and the conviction rate for child sexual abuse is a paltry 5 percent. The South African Police Service’s Child Protection Unit also lacks the necessary training and skills needed regarding HIV/AIDS.

When she realized that the greatest hindrance to prosecuting sexual predators was poor and inconsistent information gathering from children, Jackie decided to develop a uniform, professional intervention to transform the process. Her strategy involves using the Bobbi Bear as a consistent communication tool for child abuse victims. She is also mobilizing and training a cadre of community volunteers to take responsibility for the problems in their communities by protecting victims’ rights, providing comfort in a time of fear, and giving logistical support to the program.
It is imperative to the prosecution process that the reporting of sexual crimes is done accurately and efficiently—and not at the emotional expense of the victim. To facilitate easy communication between the child victim and law enforcement officers, Jackie designed the Bobbi Bear in such a way that it helps the victim express exactly what happened to him or her. The toy is designed with moveable limbs and flexible seams, and is made of smooth, non-fluffy fabric so that the child can draw on it with a felt-tip pen. Plasters are also used by the victims to indicate areas of the body that have been hurt or violated during the attack. Jackie’s bear is unique in that it is a standard symbol; until now, the practice has been to give the victim different visual props at various points throughout a case. This not only creates confusion for the child, but contributes to prosecution failures due to inconsistent stories. Now, each time the child speaks “through” Jackie’s toy bear, he or she tells the same story and the bear provides psychological protection to separate the child from the trauma. Each child is given two bears, one is given to provide comfort, and the other is to gather information.
Jackie believes kids need intervention from the moment abuse is reported and that the sooner an official statement is accurately captured, the better the chance of a successful outcome. Since police officers lack the resources and know-how to deal with cases of child abuse, Jackie is training volunteers located across various communities to respond and assist in teams at police stations. When family or friends of a victim contact her organization, Bobbi Bear, Jackie and other volunteer Child Safety Officer (CSO) teams make their way to the victim’s nearest police station and take charge of the situation on behalf of the distraught parent and child. Each person has a distinct role to play to keep the process on track: the CSO communicates directly with the on-duty officer and pressures them for professional assistance, medical help, and a copy of the charge docket; meanwhile, the second volunteer provides emotional support to the victim and parent. The team also carries essential items in what they term a “rape bag”. The rape bag consists of something to eat and drink for the victim, crayons and a note pad for the victim to draw on, a brown paper bag, and a pair of latex gloves for collecting evidence. The rape bag also consists of tissues, sanitary pads, wet wipes, and a new pair of underpants for the victim after the medico-legal examination. All these items are used to make the ordeal less traumatic and uncomfortable for the victim who often has to wait long hours at the police station and hospital before receiving attention.
Jackie’s program is set up to provide services to a victim and his or her family throughout the entire process and to establish better standards for dealing with victims of sexual abuse. As a follow-up to the initial police visit, Jackie and her team offer post-trauma counseling services to the victim and family, as well as valuable court preparation training. When the case does go to court, they are there in the courtroom with friends and family of the victim. By making their group presence known—often holding red bears on their laps as a symbol of solidarity—they oblige the judge to notice their community outrage and demand for justice.
In order to assist victims towards wholeness, Jackie and her team offer an ongoing support group for victims and their families every Saturday morning when their court cases have come to an end.
The success stories are mounting: in every child abuse case where Jackie has utilized Bobbi Bear, bail has been denied, and the conviction rate is 100 percent. Her work has been favorably noticed by the Head Prosecutor for sexual crimes for the Durban Metro region, KwaZulu Natal Province, where Jackie is now consolidating her initiative. Another positive sign is that police officers now telephone the program for help whenever a child victim of abuse is brought in. They have asked Jackie to run ongoing training programs with them on how to handle child victims and the relevant protocols, as well as the link between child sexual abuse and HIV/AIDS.
Jackie believes communities must take full responsibility for child sexual abuse if any real, long-lasting resolution is to occur. Accordingly, she draws heavily on local community volunteers in all facets of the program for such tasks as sewing and filling intervention kits that program response teams take to the police station. This collaboration creates a sense of awareness and develops partnerships within the communities. Volunteers and the community at large are realizing that they are not powerless victims, at the mercy of violent perpetrators and a dysfunctional legal system. They are discovering that they are citizens of a country with a constitution, and they have a right to expect justice.
Jackie has long recognized the need to spread her work across South Africa. To expand, however, she realized that she must first develop the financial base of the Bobbi Bear initiative and build a stronger organizational structure. Over the past eighteen months, she has made important strides in addressing both of those needs; she has successfully raised funds from a growing number of donors, drawn in more committed volunteers, and hired several new salaried employees, an administrative officer, a training officer, and three full-time Child Safety Officers. She has also opened a new Bobbi Bear Rescue Center in KwaZulu Natal that now serves as the organization’s headquarters.
With these resources in place, Jackie has recently embarked on the initial stages of an ambitious and carefully planned expansion of the geographic range of her program. She has launched new operations in George and in two other communities in KwaZulu Natal and seeded expansion into more distant areas with training programs for volunteer Child Safety Officers in the Western Cape. She expects to find qualified candidates for leadership posts in the expanded programs among these trainees and is currently laying plans for a similar initiative in the Johannesburg area.

Jackie’s path to activism became clear after a series of incidents. When she and her husband volunteered as youth leaders for a local church group, it was common for pre-teen children to come to her with stories of how they were being abused—and how their parents did not believe them—as well as their questions and fears surrounding HIV/AIDS. Hearing their stories made her decide to get training to counsel children and adults about sexual abuse. Jackie first realized something had to be done on the large scale to stop sexual criminals in 1992, when a gang of rapists who had assaulted a mentally disabled young woman was allowed to walk free. Although she had no specific background in law, as a trained abuse counselor she started lobbying the authorities case by case, often demanding statements from the various local political parties on their stand regarding the topic of sexual crimes against youth. But she knew that her activism alone would not succeed in putting perpetrators behind bars and ensuring children’s safety.
A pivotal moment came when Jackie received a phone call from a desperate mother who had reported to a local police station that her three young daughters had been abducted and raped. The mother was told that there was nothing the police could do for her, and her continued complaints were ignored. Jackie joined the mother at the charge office and demanded to see the docket of statements by the victim. The alleged statement made by a four-year-old girl, was “I was raped.” When she queried the police officer about this, she was told that actually the child did not make a statement since she could not speak.
It was clear to Jackie at that moment that the communication between an abused child and a police officer can essentially determine the extent to which justice is done. Furthermore, if law enforcement officials were overcoming these communication barriers on their end, they were frequently doing so at the expense of the child’s welfare.
Jackie began a search for toys that would help with communication, and initially placed a variety of toys at police stations and courtrooms—only to find they would be stolen. Next she tried to use dolls, but this did not work either, since she could not find culturally appropriate dolls. Undeterred, she saw that she would need a custom made toy—something with limbs that could move, a body which would help the victim talk, and a “character” which would become a symbol against child abuse. She went to work on the design and manufacture of the Bobbi Bear, relying on her experience as a mother of four and as a lobbyist. She had discovered that the only way for a small child to bond with a toy over the course of a legal case—which can last between nine months and four years—is for it to be his or her own, consistent personal property. She decided that she would test the Bobbi Bear intervention strategy in her hometown where she had experience lobbying the legal system, and would then use the area as a model with the ultimate goal of further expansion.