India Baird
LAST week, two teenage girls in different parts of our city were raped and murdered just a few metres from their families. Social media was on fire with the horrors inflicted on both girls and by the injustice of a criminal justice system that still favours one community over another.
As a mother, when I heard these stories, I was heartbroken. Will my own daughter fall victim to a violent crime just because we choose to live in this beautiful country. How can I protect her from all the dangers that lurk just outside our door? What type of world will she inherit when she grows up?
As a children’s and women’s rights activist, I was angry. Why haven’t we mobilised civil society more effectively in the last 20-plus years to demand that government put the funding, the resources needed, behind efforts to combat crime in all our communities?
As a social justice entrepreneur, who created the Thuthuzela Care Centre model for better treatment of rape survivors and helped draft the Sexual Offences Act, I was ashamed. While there are 55 rape care centres around South Africa ensuring victims are treated with dignity, the incidence of rape per capita has increased since the first centre was opened in Manenberg in 2000. Sixteen years later we are only treating the aftermath of the problem, not solving it. Over half the perpetrators of rape are still acquaintances, and often they are family members.
As a woman, I am motivated. Women make up half the population, we have the power and opportunity to change what is happening to ourselves, our daughters, our mothers, our sisters. I have witnessed how girls and women can bring about change.
Having dedicated most of my professional life towards combating violence against women and girls, I know that there is no single, or easy, answer to ending the brutal rapes, murders and abuse women and girls face every day. We know how to heal the physical wounds, no matter how crippling, if the girl or woman survives. But we have not yet figured out how to heal the trauma that each survivor and her family faces. As a nation we are traumatised, but we are not doing anything to heal that trauma. What must we do?
The first step is to start speaking up and listening. We need a National Truth Commission on violence against women and children, where girls and women, men and boys, members of the LBGTI community all share what they have experienced when they are violated, or how they feel because they share a home with a wife, sister or child who was raped or sodomised. So many women and girls, men and boys have stories to share. No one should be shamed because they are the victim of crime, they should be encouraged to tell what happened, where it happened and what happened afterwards.
Once we start talking and listening, we need to act. There are immediate things we can do to make the lives of girls and women safer. We can demand that service providers of temporary toilets in informal communities also provide lighting, security guards and separate facilities for men and women as part of their contract with government.
We can demand that proper toilets are built in communities that have been in existence for years. We can create neighbourhood safety patrols to help children walk to and from school, no matter where we live. We can walk our colleagues to the taxi rank or train station, or to their car at night and call to make sure they get home okay when they leave a party.
We can demand that journalists cover crime stories equally, and create stories that celebrate the successes of police as well as hold them accountable when they fail to act. We can create WhatsApp groups, like girls in Manenberg have done, to alert one another if it is not safe to walk down a street, or ask for a friend to accompany them to buy milk. We can create a community that does not tolerate violence against women and girls of any kind.
That rewards our boys for being compassionate and teaches them not to engage in degrading banter with their peers about girls and women.
We need men to speak up when their peers are not respectful of women and step in when they are physically and mentally abusive. We need to teach our girls to be resilient, to speak up, to watch out for one another, to be assertive. We must teach our children (and adults) to accept identities beyond boy and girl to include transgender, genderqueer, genderfluid and gender-neutral.
We must talk about sex at home and in schools, and use life orientation classes to teach children to respect their own bodies and the bodies of others. We need to provide free reproductive health care for all girls by age 12, catching any abuses early and preventing future violations.
What we don’t need to do is build more walls, put up more fences, more gates, physical and virtual, that separate us. In the long term, the problem cannot be solved with more security. The problem can only be solved if we create a culture of non-violence, a culture of equality, across gender and across race, and across income. Until we do this, all our other efforts will be temporary fixes to a problem that threatens to undermine our very existence. We must stop blaming one another, hiding behind our own prejudices, and start working together.
Women of South Africa, let’s use our anger to ensure that we finally start addressing this problem together, no matter where we live.
l Baird is the founder of Rock Girl (www.rockgirlsa.org)