Across Africa, numerous children and vulnerable adults continue to suffer in silence, exposed to abuse, neglect, exploitation, and harmful traditions that undermine their fundamental rights. This important and timely work examines the complex social, cultural, and economic factors that sustain these injustices and calls for stringent safeguarding frameworks grounded in human dignity and social justice. Drawing on local and global perspectives, it challenges governments, faith communities, policymakers, and civil society to confront different forms of child and vulnerable adult abuse and take decisive action to protect the defenceless. Both an essential resource and an urgent call to action, this work inspires everyone to stand with the vulnerable and help build an environment where every person can live free from any form of abuse, harm, fear, and exploitation.

The interest, awareness and importance of human rights has continued to dominate public discourse. This is partly because human rights help us to recognise and respect our shared rights and responsibilities so that we may be able to co-exist while upholding the values and principles of democracy. This voluminous contribution provides a systematic and comprehensive reflection on the state of human rights in Southern Africa. The main aim is to deepen the understanding of human rights from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Contributors analyse how human rights are not only promoted and protected from possible violations, but also abused with reference to divergent contexts in Southern African. The wide-ranging themes, perspectives and theoretical frameworks in this work provides for a deeper and boarder understanding of human rights in the region.

The historical development of the relationship between Muslims and Politics in South Africa indicates that Islam has played an important role in the political sphere since the dawn of the apartheid political dispensation in 1948. Thus, there has been a need to comprehensively and systematically explore the political involvement of Muslim organisations, the various ways in which they have featured in the political landscape and why such involvement is important. By closely examining the political involvement of several Muslim organisations in the post-1948 South Africa, this work offers a critical and exhaustive description of the role Islam has played in South African politics.