Abstract:
INTRODUCTION: Let us begin with a van der Merwe joke. Only it is not a joke, the MinisteR of Health, Dr Nak van der Merwe, in introducing the Child Care Bill to Parliament acknowledged the general concept that the family was the normal social and biological structure in which the child should develop (The Argus, 10 May 1983). Yet in 1983, the children of many migrants were denied the possibility of living with their fathers for eleven months and one week, 94 per cent of the year. And not only in 1983. Many children are denied the possibility of living with their fathers for year upon year: sometimes for their entire childhood. They are denied the right to develop within what Dr. van der Merwe concedes to be the normal social and biological structure.
