The roll will still be there tomorrow. You do not have to carry every file home in your chest.
A court that is independent on paper can still grind the person who sits in it. Vicarious trauma is not a soft subject. It is what happens when you hear a children’s-court enquiry before tea, a sexual-offence trial after tea, and a protection order at four o’clock, and then drive home as if the day were ordinary. Add a heavy roll, a broken recording machine, a security scare at the entrance, and a salary that does not match the responsibility, and the cost stops being “resilience.” It becomes sleeplessness, irritability on the bench, isolation from family, and, for some colleagues, debt and quiet despair. That is not weakness. It is the predictable result of asking one human being to hold other people’s worst days, every day, without a structure that holds them back.
Working conditions are a section 165 question
JASA’s position has not changed with the season. Looking after judicial mental health is part of s 165(4) — the duty of organs of state to assist and protect the courts. A reserved judgment that never comes, or a hearing that is sharp because the officer is exhausted, is not only a private sorrow. It is a public-confidence problem. Van Rooyen v The State 2002 (5) SA 246 (CC) remains the case that says magistrates are judicial officers, not a junior administrative class. Conditions of service, security of tenure and the way the institution treats the person on the bench are part of independence, not a human-resources afterthought.
Pay is still the unfinished sentence from August. A magistrate who is in debt review is not a gossip item. It is what happens when remuneration lags responsibility for years and the Independent Commission’s work is treated as optional reading. Pension, long-service recognition, a functioning vehicle scheme and a building that does not leak onto the charge sheet are not luxuries. They are how a State shows that it means s 165 when the television cameras have gone home.
What we can do for one another this spring
The law will not be rewritten before the October recess. The person next to you can be. JASA’s preferred first intervention is still the least glamorous: a walk, a cup of tea, a telephone call before 09:00. Arts and crafts are not a retreat from seriousness. A colleague who pots a succulent on a Saturday, who draws, who sews, who stands in a nursery and thinks about soil instead of a sentence, is not wasting a judicial weekend. They are putting something living between themselves and the files.
• Do not hear a children’s-court enquiry and a sexual-offence trial back-to-back without a break that is an actual break.
• Keep SADAG on the chambers board: 0800 567 567, SMS 31393. Emergency 10111. These numbers are not an admission. They are infrastructure.
• If a colleague’s judgments have slowed, or their humour has gone, do not wait for a formal wellness circular. Walk across the passage.
• Put a plant in chambers. It is a small constitutional act. It reminds the room that living things need light.
A bench that never laughs is a bench that breaks. A bench that never rests is a bench that starts to sound like the worst file on it. Spring is a good month to refuse both.