How did we normalise playing God with the identity of children?

There is an ongoing debate that DNA tests should be made compulsory as more and more men are reportedly, unknowingly raising children that are not their own. This has apparently led to these men taking their own lives once the truth is revealed.

However, in other instances, some men will go as far as killing their partners and children. We often hear a song and dance about the men whose world’s crash in the wake of such revelation.

But at the centre of this chaos is a child whom we overlook. A tiny human’s world, no matter the age, crashes into pieces. The father, who is known, is no longer the father they keep.

When the duped men elect to walk away, the child experiences this loss, the little mind is expected to process and absorb this loss… grieving and coping, simultaneously expected.

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Let’s be honest, in this world of unprotected sex and unplanned pregnancies – it’s hard being the child who must survive.

When shows like Utatakho air the dirty laundry of families, when secrets kept under wraps for decades resurface, as an entertained audience we look on, we judge the mother for their “promiscuity and lies”, we judge the men for not knowing better.

In all this, we forget that a child, no matter the age, has had a life-altering moment and an identity completely erased.

There’s an expectation from society for them to simply pick up the pieces, accept the outcome and carry on in truth – “at the very least, one is rewarded with the truth”.

Our society has become so casual with the truth that we must admit that there exists a moral decay of sorts. So casually do we question paternity, no longer a major shock, because it has now become common for lies to be moulded into truth.

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How did we normalise playing God with the identity of children? Children who will grow up believing one thing, only to have to process and accept another.

We have become so careless with life-changing truths that we are drowning in the blurred norms and standards of a society that lives in truth.

This very society where every second person has the ancestral calling but would not be bothered to be honest on ancestral identity? We live in a time of deceit and contradiction.