THE PURPOSE AND AMBIT OF THE OFFENCE OF CONCEALMENT OF BIRTH S v Molefe 2012 (2) SACR 574 (GNP)
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".