CAPE ARGUS - 1939,
February 4
The
appointment of Miss Christina Lombard (24) to be Public Prosecutor of the
Auckland Park Juvenile Court, Johannesburg, is welcomed by social workers in
Cape Town, who see in it a sign of the expansion of women’s opportunities for
social service.
Several women
barristers, the first of whom was Advocate Gladys Steyn, have acted as public prosecutor on circuit. Miss Lombard’s is the first appointment of a woman
to the permanent post.
Adv. Oblowitz
told a representative of The Argus that a Public Prosecutor is less concerned
with the legal aspect of the case than with the problem of getting a view of
the child as a product of his social setting. The object is not to secure a
conviction, but to do all possible to set the child on the right path so that
he may be reconciled to his social surroundings.
She welcomed
the appointment of a woman as an indication that this view of the problem was
accepted, but she was not prepared to say that a woman was any more likely than
a man to get a full grasp of the situation. In many places the chief constable
was the public prosecutor, and she had often found him a man of human sympathy,
with a complete understanding of the child and a full acquaintance with the
child’s environment and its drawbacks.
“It is not
the sex of the person but the understanding of his social background that
matters,” she said. “A human understanding which induces its possessor to be at
pains to ferret out all relevant details is as often found in a man as in a
woman.”
The Public
Prosecutor of a Juvenile Court, the Magistrate and the Probation Officer set
themselves the task of reconstructing the child’s social background so that he
may be in harmony with it. This is their common problem, uncomplicated by legal
points.
SPECIAL
INTEREST
One great
drawback in the present system of promotion in the civil service is that work
in juvenile courts offers no higher grades. A magistrate who finds special
interest in a children’s court and is particularly useful in that kind of work
is completely lost to it when promotion moves him elsewhere.
If women were
to find a scope for usefulness in this work, some means of grading should be
devised to enable them, though promoted, to continue in the work in which they
were most useful, said Miss Oblowitz.
She pointed
out that people remained juveniles up to the age of 19, and it happened sometimes
that licensed drivers of motor-cars were under this age and might be charged
before juvenile courts. On the other hand, young people charged with a serious
offence had to go to the Supreme Court. A young girl charged with infanticide,
for instance, sadly needed some such understanding as she might expect from a
woman.
SCOPE FOR
WOMEN
Although a magistrate
in South Africa differs entirely in position and responsibility from the
English conception of a magistrate, Miss Oblowitz said she did not see that
that constituted an insuperable barrier against women being sometimes appointed
to the Bench, provided they were civil servants and possessed the necessary
qualifications.
Besides Miss
Lombard, who is a B.A. and LL.B., there were several others in various
Government departments. There were Miss Steyn, the probation officer, Miss Sutton
in the Department of Justice, and Miss Dawes in the Labour Department of
Pretoria, to mention only a few of the women who had taken their LL.B.
Women in the clerical ranks of the civil
service, Miss Oblowitz pointed out, had to resign upon marriage. She wondered
whether a similar disability would hamper their usefulness in the professional
grades
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