Better ways to combat violence

PROTEST/SPARKPORT / PROTESTS FORMING PART OF THE 16 DAYS OF ACTIVISM SAYING NO TO WOMEN AND CHILD ABUSE

PROTEST/SPARKPORT / PROTESTS FORMING PART OF THE 16 DAYS OF ACTIVISM SAYING NO TO WOMEN AND CHILD ABUSE

Published Dec 11, 2014

Share

Carol Bower offers the government some suggestions of how better to spend the millions they do each year on the 16 Days campaign.

South Africa is a society permeated with violence of all kinds, in particular, high levels of gender-based violence. The government has responded in a number of ways, including the annual commemoration of the 16 Days of Activism For No Violence Against Women and Children, Women’s Month and Child Protection Week and Month. The government, in partnership with civil society, spends a great deal of money on these every year. After several years, we are entitled to ask if it’s working.

The stark statistics of the situation are fairly well known – among the highest rates of rape, child rape, intimate femicide, child homicide and domestic violence in the world. So, perhaps it’s not working. Perhaps we need to think about better ways to use the money we spend on one-off, spray-and-pray-type interventions. This would have the added bonus of saving the country the R28 billion-odd that violence against women and children currently costs South Africa.

I’d like to offer the government some suggestions of how better to spend the millions they do each year on the 16 Days campaign, on Women’s Month, and on Child Protection Week and Month. In no particular order of importance, I invite them to take their pick here.

The system:

Research examining a random, representative sample of 2 068 rapes reported in Gauteng found that:

* “Only half of reported cases resulted in arrests, and only 42.8 percent of suspects were charged in court.

* “Fewer than one in five cases (17.3 percent) resulted in trials.

* “Just over one in 20 (6.2 percent) of these reported rapes led to convictions. However, some of these convictions were for lesser charges, so overall, only 4.1 percent of cases reported as rape resulted in convictions for rape.

* “One in seven convicted rapists (15.6 percent) received less than the mandated 10 years’ minimum sentence.

A good choice for spending all that money would be to ensure there are enough adequately equipped and staffed Thuthuzela Centres linked to specialised Sexual Offences courts across the country, and improve the investigation and prosecution of sexual offences cases. This will go a long way to reducing the impunity for rape that seems currently to prevail.

Or it could be used to ensure the proper implementation of the Sexual Offences, Domestic Violence and Children’s acts. This will need larger allocations from the national fiscus than has hitherto been the case. For example, the allocation to implement the Children’s Act for the current (2013/2014) financial year is only 44 percent of the amount actually needed to implement the act at its most basic level (R5.714 million instead of R12.935m).

Another good use would be to prohibit corporal punishment in the home in the upcoming amendment to the Children’s Act. While the Department of Social Development has publicly committed to this on more than one occasion, activists for prohibition are not convinced that this will mean that the already drafted amendment will have a safe passage through Parliament. Support from the gender sector is very important here.

Messaging:

Perhaps mounting a massive and sustained awareness-raising campaign could be considered, ensuring messages conveying the strength and intelligence of women, and the kindness and empathy of men are on posters and billboards in every town and city, every police station, library and clinic, community centre and government office in the country.

Working with the business community to print positive messages about strong, capable woman and nurturing, caring men on their product packaging would probably not be very expensive.

Developing and funding videos which focus on non-stereotypical depictions of men and women in clinics and any government facility at which people queue would cost a little more, but could easily be done.

Increased support to Civil Society Organisations (CSOs):

CSOs have a long and rich history of “filling the gaps” in service delivery to vulnerable groups, especially children and women. During the apartheid era, many of these CSOs were set up to provide services to vulnerable people who were completely ignored by the welfare sector at the time.

In the post-apartheid era, a large number of CSOs have continued to provide such services, but in a fundamentally altered funding scenario. The withdrawal of a significant number of traditional international donors from funding basic service delivery and the reluctance by the government to fully fund these service providers has placed many CSOs in a very precarious position, with many having either closed or facing closure in the near future.

This withdrawal of funding by traditional international donors is related to perceptions that South Africa is a middle-income country, and as such should be able to pay for the delivery of legislatively mandated services from the government purse. While CSOs deliver the majority of child welfare services in South Africa on subcontract to the government, they are only partially funded by the government to do so. The funding provided by the government to CSOs falls far short of the actual cost of providing quality services.

Better financial support to NGOs, related more clearly to the size of the need and the quality required, could be another way to spend those millions.

The education system:

Avenues that could be pursued here include ensuring that the prohibition of corporal punishment in schools (in place since 2000) is implemented. Research on violence in schools in 2012 reported that “little headway has been made in reducing the levels of corporal punishment at schools, with provincial rates ranging between 22.4 and 73.7 percent”.

Parenting issues, the rights of women and children, and the peaceful resolution of conflict and differences could be incorporated into the life skills curriculum at relatively low cost.

And that is just some of what could be done in an ongoing and sustained manner that would give better results than short campaigns that allow the government to tick a box but achieve very little else.

* Carol Bower has worked to prevent and respond appropriately to violence against women and children for nearly four decades. After being the director of organisations dealing with women’s and children’s rights for many years, she begun consulting on child rights. Most of her work these days is focused on preventing physical and sexual violence against children and promoting caring and nurturing parenting.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

Cape Times

Related Topics: