Children are blessings, but what happens when your blessing starts messing with the law? That is where Khulisa Social Solutions steps in.
Khulisa offers services to children who are at risk and in conflict with the law. The registered non-profit organisation (NPO) is operating three branches in Gauteng and as the name says, it is growing.
The NPO offers various programmes to children aged 12–18 to help and evolve them into becoming better people and adults in society. The three diversion programmes they offer are Positively cool life skills; Silence the Violent Aggressive Behaviour Change; and the Buddy Bully Programme which assists the culprit as well as the victim in bully-related incidents. The NPO also has an adults diversion that stems from the children diversion, essentially to assist young adults aged 20–35 redirect their lives, as there is an increasing number of adults committing petty crimes, “That is where we teach them life skills programme, so that they don’t offend again,” explained Dineo Tseme, a social worker at Khulisa.
While diversion assists children as well as young adults in redirecting their lives from committing crimes, early intervention services aim to reduce the risk factors and increase the protective factors in children’s lives. For this service Khulisa receives referrals from government departments, CBOs, other NGOs, schools and various groups of people. Tseme also explained that they have never had a case where children reoffended while in the programme. Khulisa has also created a programme that aims to address the root cause of crime and not just the crime itself, which focuses on the contributing factors that lead to crime such as breakdown in family societal values, and poor environmental conditions to name a few. This programme is known as the social crime awareness and prevention programme.
With holidays being the ‘perfect’ time for children to dabble in crime, Khulisa has stepped in and created various school holiday programmes so that children may be kept from harm’s way while educating and equipping them with important basic life skills. The services in the school holiday programmes include sessions with topics such as responsibility, keeping safe and peer pressure, just to name a few.
The restorative justice concept is aimed at introducing healing to victims and giving offenders a chance to repair the harm they have caused, and includes peacemaking circles, family conferencing, and victim-offender mediation. Raising children in this day and age is nowhere near what it used to be 10 to 20 years back, and Khulisa also assists in this department with its parenting programme that aims to equip parents with fitting parenting skills transferred by Khulisa Social Solutions Social Workers and Auxiliary Workers with support groups readily available.
