Social workers who protect children in South Africa carry a burden of trauma – better preparation could help

Ante Emmanuel, Pexels , CC BY When a child is raped, abandoned or removed from a violent home in South Africa, a child protection social worker is assigned to the wellbeing of that child.

They listen to the details, assess the danger, make urgent decisions.

Once the child has been placed somewhere safe, the social worker moves on to the next case.

I am a social work researcher and educator, and have worked in the field of trauma for more than three decades.

Protecting children has been at the centre of that work.

Over time a question has kept surfacing: who protects the people doing the protecting? In a recent study in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, I interviewed frontline child protection social workers and supervisors, and then piloted a care programme with them.

This experience suggested a troubling answer: many social workers are carrying trauma silently, in a system that offers them almost nothing to hold it.

South Africa has roughly 44,500 registered social workers for a population of about 63 million , and the Eastern Cape’s ratio is much the same, with just over 5,100 social workers for some 7.2 million people.

The scale of what child protection social workers face is difficult to overstate.

In 2024-25, the South African Police Service recorded 22,055 sexual offences against children.

In the same year the Department of Social Development logged 26,852 cases of child abuse and neglect, nearly 10,000 of them involving sexual abuse.

Read more: South Africa declared gender-based violence a national disaster.

But how will frontline workers be kept safe? For practitioners in the Eastern Cape, abuse, coerced pregnancy, abandonment and infant death are not separate problems.

They are the same families and the same case files, one crisis leading into the next, and the law says they must deal with all of it.