Some of the moments I celebrated in this democracy were the abolishment of capital punishment in 1995, followed by the banning of corporal punishment at schools in 1998. We inherited violence from the past brutal regime.

A teacher’s authority was sacrosanct and final. As a minor you had to submit to the elders. Disobedience was frowned upon at home and in the community. Last year an inquiry found that 330,000 minors were molested by priests, deacons and lay members of the Catholic Church from the 1950s.

Culprits included teachers at Catholics schools. The president of the Bishops’ Conference of France, Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, revealed last Monday that 11 former and serving French bishops stood accused of child abuse.

Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, 78, bishop of Bordeaux, confessed publicly to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in the 1980s. All that triggered sad memories of male teachers in SA severely punishing teenage girls for refusing their sexual advances and impregnating some of them in the 1970s.

Cultural practices were held in high esteem. Royalty members such as kings, chiefs and headmen had a field day on vulnerable girl children. Statutory rape was foreign then.

Thanks to civilisation in this new dispensation. Never again shall learners be subjected to physical punishment by teachers. We are an extremely violent nation in a sick world.

Thami Zwane, Edenvale, Ekurhuleni