Cape Town - Dear scumbags, I don’t know what else to call you. “Monsters” is too fanciful.
Monsters have multiple arms and green bodies; they live under our beds and in our heads. You, on the other hand, are excruciatingly real. You have a face and a name and a family and a smell. You live among us, eating, sleeping, walking and talking.
Franziska Blöchliger is no longer eating, sleeping, walking and talking. Sinoxolo Mafevuka is no longer eating, sleeping, walking and talking. Because of you. I wonder how that makes you feel. In the dead of night, when you can’t sleep and you’re alone with your thoughts and you feel your hands lying next to you – those same hands that took and maimed and killed and destroyed – do you feel anything at all?
Defence lawyers might argue mitigating circumstances. They might point to unemployment, or a lack of education, or addictions, anger issues or broken families. And it is true that too many South Africans drift in rough seas with no anchor to hold them steady. But here’s the thing, scumbags, most would never think of doing what you did.
There are other scumbags like you: the six men who gang-raped two teenage girls in the Free State and the two men who found the terrified girls and then did the same; the so-called Rhodes Monument serial rapist; Johannes Kana, who was convicted of raping and murdering 17-year-old Anene Booysen; the man who attacked and raped five elderly women hoeing mealie fields in Limpopo; the man who recently stopped his car and threateningly told my 15-year-old niece to get in.
And in bars and workplaces, stations and homes, this violence and sense of entitlement is played out on various levels: the man who gets aggressive when a woman politely turns down a drink; the woman forced to remain silent about her leery boss; the man on the train who rubs his crotch against women; the countless women across the country who are made to feel worthless and hopeless by abusive partners.
This morning, I walked the dogs past a school. A group of teenage boys was hanging around the gate. One asked me how much for the dogs? Did they bite? And would I like to suck his dick? The other boys sniggered. Tell me, scumbags, what makes these boys feel entitled to yell abuse at a stranger? Why is it that when I walked past a group of girls, they ignored me and carried on skipping? Is this violence bred into you? Were you taught to hate women? Is it because you are scared and small inside, your synapses flashing with self-hatred?
And why, scumbags, did Franziska’s family feel moved to describe her as a girl who didn’t do drugs or drink alcohol? Why do so many victims of gender violence feel they have to justify their actions when it is your actions that are dastardly, sick and depraved?
Patriarchy, they will say. The institutionalised violence of apartheid, they will say. A disenfranchised society whose moral fabric is frayed; a nation mired in inequality, they will say. And these are all valid reasons for our country’s high levels of violence. But what are we to do about it, scumbags? Walk in forests armed with guns? Cloister ourselves away in communes? Petition the state for a special women’s police unit? Form highly trained militias with cells across the nation? Train our daughters how to use weapons?
I would like to think the state could play a role in stamping out scumbags like you. But as evidenced by Sinoxolo’s case, our police force is often under-resourced and under-trained and our justice system toothless and inconsistent. There is also a lack of political will to make a difference.
Instead of being educational and empowering, our annual National Women’s Day is merely an opportunity for grandstanding, lip service and special offers on slippers. And, disturbingly, sexism paves our country’s corridors of power. Just a few days ago, President Jacob Zuma reportedly told a group of female journalists in KwaZulu-Natal that because it was a “white man’s world”, he couldn’t compliment them on their attractiveness because he would be accused of harassment. If that is the attitude towards women at the highest level, then what hope is there?
What needs to happen, scumbags, so women can feel safe to jog alone or go to the toilet alone? Or go to a bar alone, or a restaurant alone, or a shebeen alone, or a shop alone, or bed alone, or a church alone, or a beach alone, or a lecture alone, or a clinic alone, or a school alone, or a field alone? Gender education? Better male role models? Better options, which would lead to better choices?
I want to see your faces, scumbags. I want to see what you look like. I know you’ll look chillingly ordinary. You will have mothers and sisters, possibly daughters and nieces. There will be no multiple arms or green bodies.
Tomorrow I will walk the dogs past the school again. And though I will feel bad – because the boys are just teenagers, right? Just messing around – I might let the dogs off their leads if they ask me if I want to suck their dicks, because those thoughts and words are the same shape as the geometry of violence that took Franziska and Sinoxolo, and the thousands of women who are no longer here. Because of scumbags like you. Just, and all, because of you.
Cape Argus