“My earliest memories were of going to court with my mom – who is a single parent - and I was terrified. I recall a cold, blueish-brown building, being ushered into this bleak waiting room on the first floor with a psychologist who didn ’ t seem to know how to relate to a child and surrounded by all these lawyers telling me I will have to be a witness on the stand.” She adds, “It wasn ’ t a kind, caring space for a child”. COURT FOR KIDS
F
or Indio Friedmann, family was not where the heart lay, but where the hurt was. She still shudders when she recounts her parents’ ugly custody battle.
“It wasn’t just the fear of being taken away from my mom. The worst thing was that I felt it was my fault we were there. There was
so much guilt and shame attached to that place.”
Now a final year Law student at Stellenbosch University, Friedmann has channelled the painful shards of childhood memory into a pioneering creative project: the refurbishment of the children’s waiting room on the first floor of Cape Town’s Wynberg Magistrate’s Court. Its inception was in March this year, but labour began in July and the new room was “birthed” in early September. She calls it her ‘Courts for Kids’ baby and she has received support from court personnel, legal eagles, social workers, and artists alike. It has proven so transformative an environment for traumatised children that there are plans to roll out the project countrywide.
But it is not only the visceral details of the family conflict that have left the residue of trauma; it is in the building where it was finally played out, the Children’s Court of Cape Town’s Wynberg Magistrates’ Court. She was 3- years old at the time. Imagine the confusion and trauma for a child introduced to an unwelcoming environment swarming with adults in ominous- looking black gowns. Imagine being a child bundled into a waiting room, where there were no toys, only hard, unwelcoming benches and the traces of a mural on the peeling, jaundiced wall. That was Friedmann’s daily reality until the court finally ruled in favour of her mother.
Courts for Kids Founder, Indio Friedmann
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Dec 2022 | Collective Action Magazine
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