Access to smartphones and the boom in social media platforms has seen a proliferation of those who want to be influencers. To a large extent, social media has revealed the need for relevance which remained hidden in several people. As such, people are sharing everything that would make them trend – from studio pictures that amplify their looks to gruesome images and videos of violence, child abuse and, sometimes, tragic scenes of death that ought not to be captured on camera. This is the content that we come across every day, and it is somewhat disturbing.
Apart from videos of some Christians exchanging blows in otherwise sacred places, Malawi’s social media space has also recently been awash with videos of some people punishing thieves or suspected offenders. These are perhaps the most horrible, especially when the punished are underage. It is not news that some adults among us are very abusive to kids that don’t deserve the violence unleashed on them. We have heard stories of mothers burning the fingers of their sons and daughters after catching them stealing pieces of meat from cooking pots. Orphans are often at the receiving end of such punitive punishments.
Just some months ago, there was a story in our newspapers where a child lost his limbs as a consequence of the punishment meted out on them for some mischief. Those who caught this child tightly tied his hands behind his back and he stayed like that for days. The result was that blood stopped flowing to the other side of the limbs causing a serious medical condition that could not be remedied otherwise. The child’s situation is regrettably sad and those who did this to him have taken away from his life something they can never give back.
Despite such horrible stories coming out and perpetrators being arrested, it seems that the trend continues. Hardly a day goes by without new pictures and videos containing such abuses. The most recent one also involved a young boy who was apparently caught stealing maize in a field to feed his starving family. Those who caught him were very harsh, disregarding his age and the circumstances leading to his crime. It took one church leader’s intervention for some people to begin to feel for this boy and others in his shoes. The church leader supported this boy and his family by, among other things, buying them food and clothes. But still others questioned this – asking if mercy has now become the reward for crime.
It is true that crime is a vice that ought not to be tolerated at any cost. Crime deserves punishment, and there are no two ways about it. But when petty crimes are being committed by underage children, one has to question what may be wrong in that setup. We know children to be innocent until the world teaches them otherwise or forces them into paths they would normally not tread. A child stealing in order to feed his family is as sad as any story can go. Before tying that child to a tree, we need to ask ourselves what it is that we are not doing right in our communities to have such desperate cases. Maybe we need to be looking more towards supporting each other than building fences that keep others out. It is more likely that we know those who are sleeping on empty stomachs in our communities, but there is not much we do for them. It is one thing to be a criminal and another to be forced into crime.
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Mob justice, by its nature, is a form of punishment that can hardly be justified. There are a lot of oversights in it and it is often brutal. Of course, it is enraging to have somebody sneak into your compound and grab what is rightly yours, and this is why society put in place avenues for punishment. And when mob justice targets underage kids, the consequences are dire, even for the future. The punishment that we give to children must be for purposes of reformation and not necessarily retribution. Retributive punishment can only kill the child or make them even worse criminals. As a nation, we also need to ask ourselves what we are not doing right to end up here.
