The Big Bad Wolf

KIDS are vulnerable and trusting, and it is our job as parents to remind them of basic safety rules.

- Vanessa Papas

ONE day Little Red Riding Hood goes to visit her grandma. Can you guess who she meets in the woods? The story of Little Red Riding Hood may just be a popular fairytale to some, but tragically this world is home to many wolves in the form of predators who prey on vulnerable children, and most abductors don’t usually fit the stereotypical profile of ‘a big bad wolf’.

When 13-year-old Rene Roman went missing earlier this year, the community of Cape Town feared the worst. On the day of her disappearance, March 10, Rene had been helping her mother take washing down from the line when she asked to go to the nearby shop to buy chips. A week later her half naked and decomposed body was found. She had been murdered. A 50-year-old man was arrested in connection with Rene’s death, enraging the community as he was the same man who had been part of a team who’d searched for the child in the days following her disappearance. 

Just weeks later the police found themselves working on yet another case of a child missing. Three-year-old Courtney Pieters had last been seen by a neighbour playing alone on a corner near her Pluto Street home in Elsies River. She was supposed to have been in the care of neighbours, but was reportedly left unsupervised when she disappeared.