Crime prevention is a new endeavour for South Africa and its progress has been mixed. One area of weakness is the generation and utilisation of information, which is crucial to its success. This Open Society Foundation article offers a review of developments in the policy and practice of crime prevention in South Africa and briefly discusses initiatives intended to prevent or reduce crime.

The general discourse around crime prevention has been technical and for the most part has disregarded the bigger socio-economic questions. Deep economic and social divisions and serious problems of poverty, crime and HIV/Aids are evident in South Africa. More consideration should be given to these issues within the crime prevention discourse. Notions of crime prevention have also remained state centred and this has engendered intellectual and practical limitations. Social crime prevention needs to be recognised in the domain of civil society and the state could play a number of lesser roles in doing so: as supporter, facilitator and enabler. Civil society organisations need to function more professionally, and their accountability mechanisms strengthened.

The policy environment surrounding crime prevention in South Africa has been static and there have been few developments. Civil society organisations on the other hand have been energetic and committed to crime prevention, but their overall work has suffered from a lack of rigour. Key findings are that:

• Some developments at the central government level should impact positively on crime prevention, such as the National Crime Prevention Strategy and the new child justice legislation.
• There have also been positive developments at the local government level, such as the Urban Renewal Programme and integrated development plans.
• Much learning has been generated in terms of children and young people. Mechanisms to promote school safety have to be integrated into how schools and school districts are run.
• Violence against women prevention has been lacking as specialists in this field have been engaged in service provision and lobbying. Prevention initiatives to combat general violence are too new to assess.
• There is a gap in knowledge about victim support services in crime prevention.
• Crime prevention initiatives focusing on geographic areas have been the most labour and resource intensive but much learning has emerged in terms of partnerships, coordination, structures for crime prevention and scale.

Crime prevention is dependent on quality information. An information driven approach to crime prevention should be taken. Key recommendations are that:

• More attention should be given to programme theory, evaluation and documentation and the development of technical skills relating to management of information.
• An equal commitment to an information-driven approach is needed from donors and NGOs as well as governments.
• A national crime prevention centre could be valuable.
• Government departments should focus on fulfilling their core functions as this may have a key impact on crime prevention if they are able to deliver.
• Initiatives for preventing violence against women could include gender-based violence education in schools, community-based safety promotion and working with men to enrich family life.

Source: https://gsdrc.org/document-library/what-have-we-learned-social-crime-prevention-in-south-africa-a-critical-overview/

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