The Birth to Ten study, which co-incided with the last ten years of intensive political and social transition in South Africa, is one of the biggest and longest running studies of child health and development world-wide.

The study suggests that while poverty in itself does not make for maladapted children, violence has extremely damaging psychological effects.

Sometimes called “Mandela’€™s children”, the 3, 275 children in the Birth to Ten (BTT) study were all born in the Greater Johannesburg area during the seven weeks following Nelson Mandela’€™s release from prison in February 1990.

The children, who have been tracked by a multidisciplinary team of more than 20 scientists since their mothers’€™ pregnancies, have now all turned ten years old.

“We have a complete cross-section of urban children. Rich and poor, black, white, Indian and Coloured,” says Dr Thea de Wet of the Medical Research Council, who co-ordinated the BTT study.

De Wet points out that the study shows that poverty in itself does not make for socially or psychologically maladapted children.

“Some of the BTT children are growing up in wealthy families but experience a lot of problems because their family life is dysfunctional, while other BTT children live in poor areas but are doing very well because of a caring environment.”

“It’€™s not so much about poverty as the stability of the home,” adds De Wet.

As a psychologist, Prof Linda Richter from the University of Natal, used the BTT study to explore the impact of violence on young children’€™s development.

It is well known that children who are maltreated or exposed to violence are likely to show aggressive and antisocial behaviour throughout the rest of their lives.

One of Richter’€™s findings was that bullying, including physical violence, was extremely common in Johannesburg primary schools. 38% of the Birth to Ten children reported having been the victim of bullying at school.

These figures are much higher, says Richter, than any of the figures previously reported by similar studies.

According to De Wet, bullying is as indication that children are not being encouraged to solve their problems in non-violent ways.

“These kids see grown-ups all around them using violence as their first means of solving problems, and corporal punishment is rife in all the schools. We live in a violent society and we make no effort to encourage children to solve problems in different ways,” says De Wet.

Richter’€™s study also shows that children who had experienced bullying were 1.4 times more likely to choose future careers in law enforcement, probably because it would give them the power to control and harm others when they were grown up.

When asked to explain why they wanted to become “police”, many children did not seem to be concerned about protecting themselves and others. What they wanted was to have the power to inflict harm; a power which others currently had over them.

To explain their career choice, these children said things like, “I want to hit the children”, “So that I can hit somebody when I am big” and, “I want to use bombs”.

It is already known that violence and abuse experienced in childhood produces violent and abusive adults. What Richter’€™s study suggests is that it also produces our next crop of potential police recruits. ‘€“ Health-e news service