When the body of a newborn boy was found on a pile of refuse in a field near Rustenburg recently, he became yet another victim in what researchers are calling a crisis that is “global in its reach but local in its expression”.

Neonaticide – killing a baby within 24 hours of birth – is rife in SA and, according to an international study just published in the Archives of Women’s Mental Health, “accounts from women convicted of neonaticide emphasised the shock of an unintended pregnancy with which they had to cope alone”...