THE PURPOSE AND AMBIT OF THE OFFENCE OF CONCEALMENT OF BIRTH S v Molefe 2012 (2) SACR 574 (GNP)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The statutory offence of concealment of birth inevitably attracts controversy. It has been argued in the 2008 Canadian case of R v Levkovic (2008 CarswellOnt 5744, 235 CCC (3d) 417, 178 CRR (2d) 285, 79 WCD (2d) 493, heard in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice) that it is clear from the history of this offence that its purpose was to stigmatize socially and punish criminally women who bore illegitimate or “bastard” children – “an objective entirely offensive in modern society to liberty and security of the person”. Moreover, in the Memorandum on the Objects of the Judicial Matters Amendment Bill 2008 (B48-2008), the precursor of the South African statute which amended this offence, the criticism of the Women’s Legal Centre recorded that the provisions of section 113 of the General Law Amendment Act 46 of 1935 (which sets out the offence) are “overly broad, lacking in definition, archaic and their constitutional validity is questionable, often impinging on the right to dignity of women charged under it”. The purpose of this note is to examine these criticisms, assessing both the substantive aspects and constitutional aspects of the offence, in the course of an appraisal of the recent case of S v Molefe (2012 (2) SACR 574 (GNP)). The case of Levkovic will provide a useful comparative reference point for the inquiry into the constitutionality of the offence. First, however, it is necessary to place the offence in its historical context.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it