The hostel is Lwandle in the Cape, the writer an eleven-year-old girl, one of the children whose lives are documented in Assaulting Childhood. In this intensively researched, graphic and often horrifying book, Sean Jones examines the overcrowded, squalid, violent milieu of the migrant worker hostel through the eyes of a handful of the myriad children who call it home. In tracing the lives of these children, the book begins to uncover layers of childhood experience in South Africa which have hardly begun to be known, let alone understood. The work offers invaluable pointers to those involved in the planning of education, housing and welfare services, in urban and rural development initiatives and in children's rights lobbies. It is these people who will, as South Africa moves towards a new dispensation, have to address the implications of the experiences revealed here.

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