Siebert is among a growing body of parents whose children are kidnapped, raped and murdered in South Africa every year.
Activist body Missing Children South Africa says about 2000 children are killed in the country annually. Just under 1000 are listed as missing.
Siebert swallows hard when describing the 18 months since his son, Steven, went missing just before Christmas 2005, while on holiday with his parents in Plettenberg Bay in the Western Cape Province.
His body was found hidden in bushes near the home of Olivier, a Zimbabwean-born handyman who has confessed to abusing a number of children over several years....
"(There is) a serious moral corrosion within our communities and society," the Inkatha Freedom Party's Patricia Lebenya said recently.
"Our children are not safe anymore and government has not done enough to create safer environments." ...
Newspapers have been carrying stories almost daily about children falling prey to violent criminals in recent months.
They include Sheldean Human, 7, from the capital Pretoria, who was raped and murdered in February, and Mikayla Rossouw, 6, of Swellendam in the Western Cape who was found dead in the backyard shack of a neighbour's house in June.
The body of Sonja Brown, 2, from Rawsonville in the Western Cape, was found in a sewerage manhole last month, and Anastacia Wiese, 11, was found dead in the ceiling of her mother's home in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town, in March.
Eight-year-old Refilwe Ringane's body was discovered in a field in Modimolle in the northern Limpopo Province in June, while an 11-year-old girl from Bishop Lavis in the Western Cape gave birth to a baby last month after being raped, allegedly by a neighbour.
Arrests have been made in most cases, but the families' wounds are slow to heal.
"There is no way to understand the grief and the anguish a family goes through," said Vernon Norton, 47, whose six-month-old grand-daughter, Jordan Leigh, was murdered in June 2005.
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