ANZIO JACOBS

Every April South Africa rehearses the language of freedom.

We speak about liberation, dignity, rights and the unfinished business of democracy. We invoke the Constitution. We remind ourselves how far we have come. Freedom Day becomes a ritual of reassurance, a collective insistence that the arc is bending in the right direction.

For the children of SA, this all rings hollow.

If freedom is the ability to move safely, to speak without fear, to learn without harm, to exist without exploitation, then millions of children are not free. They are managed. They are contained. They are surveilled. They are exposed.

Increasingly this happens in places we pretend are neutral or inevitable.

A child’s day now moves seamlessly between physical and digital spaces. School, transport, home,internet, platform, device, algorithm.

At every point, adults make decisions that shape what children can see, say, access and risk. Yet when harm occurs, we act as if no-one was in charge.

This is the lie at the centre of our freedom narrative. Our children are not safe. Our systems are not protective.

In the offline world, we see this in the form of unsafe roads, overcrowded taxis, schools without counselors or security, and communities stretched thin by poverty and violence. These are material conditions produced by policy choices and budgetary priorities.

In the digital world, the violence is quieter but no less real. Children are tracked before they can read. Their attention is monetised, their data harvested. Their bodies are sexualised, their emotions manipulated, their conflicts amplified. All of this is done through systems designed to maximise engagement and profit, not wellbeing.

We continue to speak about children’s “online behaviour” as if behaviour exists outside of architecture, as if platforms are not engineered environments, and as if choice is meaningful when options are constrained by design.

Freedom does not exist where consent is manufactured. Telling children to be responsible online while refusing to regulate the systems that profit from their exposure is not empowerment. It is abdication.

April should force us to ask an uncomfortable question: freedom for whom?

Adults enjoy the benefits of a digital economy that externalises its harms onto children. Corporations innovate without consequence. The state lags behind, invoking complexity while children absorb the cost of delay.

We celebrate freedom while normalising a childhood defined by risk. This contradiction is not accidental. It reflects whose freedom matters politically.

Children do not occupy the centre of our democratic imagination. Their rights are often treated as aspirational rather than enforceable. Their protection is framed as welfare, not justice. Their voices are welcomed symbolically, then ignored materially.

Freedom Day speeches rarely mention children unless they are positioned as future beneficiaries of progress, not present rights holders.

But freedom deferred is freedom denied.

A child who grows up unsafe does not simply step into freedom at adulthood. Harm accumulates, trauma compounds and inequality hardens. By the time rights are formally accessible, the damage has already been done.

This is why child safety and digital justice are not niche issues, but democratic ones.

A society that cannot guarantee children safe passage, safe learning environments, and safe digital spaces is failing its constitutional promises in real time.

In Vhembe District, Thohoyandou, an incident that began online quickly spilled into the physical world, where a child was followed by other pupils repeating the same abuse first shared digitally.

This case reminds us harm does not remain online: it travels with children into classrooms, streets and daily life, demanding urgent accountability and action.

Digital platforms operate across borders, but their impacts are local. Children in SA are exposed to global systems over which they have no influence and little protection. Regulation remains timid, fragmented and reactive. Corporate accountability is discussed endlessly and enforced rarely.

Freedom rhetoric becomes a convenient distraction from regulatory cowardice.

If Freedom Day is to mean anything for children, it must move beyond symbolism. It must translate into decisions that restrict corporate overreach, resource child protection properly, and treat children’s safety as non-negotiable infrastructure rather than optional care.

Freedom is not a feeling. It is a condition. For our children, that condition does not yet exist.

Until we are willing to confront the systems that benefit from their vulnerability, Freedom Day will remain an adult celebration, built on a collective refusal to notice who is being left behind.