GBV

To understand South Africa’s present condition, in which violence against women and girls is endemic, we must travel back to an unfamiliar past. Digging deep, answers can be unearthed to questions about forms of gendered abuse that unrelentingly flourish today. It is important to do this work, as violence against women cannot be eradicated without exploring the rationalisations that sustain it.

The 2013 Global Gender Gap Report reveals that gender gaps across the globe are slowly starting to close. Although international and regional gender equality instruments are helping to close these gaps, many parts of the world, including Southern Africa are still far from achieving equality. One important factor hindering this achievement is that our efforts tend to exclude the engagement of men in fighting for gender equality.
 

We observe International Women’s Day on 8 March 2014, which aptly sets the stage for the annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW58) held at the United Nations in New York starting on 10 March 2014. This year’s CSW also coincides with the 10^th annual Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW). Ironically and hypocritically, the fall of the ‘tragic hero’, Oscar Pistorius, will continue to garner undue resources and dominate international headlines, while these events and women’s everyday oppression will be merely deliberated and largely unheard.
 

Sixteen Days of Activism, is also 16 Days of emotional upheaval. I have been sub-editing ‘I’ stories, women’s first-hand accounts of men beating them, raping them, abusing their children and breaking them. Many of these accounts also express a deep resentment, because their abuse also led to their HIV positive status.

In April 2012, a cellphone video of a teenager with an intellectual disability being gang raped by men and boys from her community in Soweto went viral. Authorities had no choice but to attend to the 17-year-old’s ordeal, so too, South Africans had to acknowledge the violence that so many women and girls with disabilities face on a daily basis.

There was quite an uproar following the recent release of South Africa’s national crime statistics - considered the worst figures in the ten years. However, lost in these heated debates is the rampant sexual violence that women face every day of their lives. If we do not, at the very least halve gender-based violence (GBV), we will certainly be fighting a losing battle against crime in this country.