Cape Town - Women and children withstood the midday heat to hear personal accounts of abuse and bravery close to home during a programme against gender-based violence in Woodlands, Mitchells Plain.
Organised by the Tanwir Women’s Forum, the programme was held at Jenner Gardens Square during the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence against Women and Children, with nearly 100 people present.
Event organiser Fatima Majal, 52, founded the forum in 2014, with the intention of assisting the community with food and Islamic knowledge, among others. “Whatever problems people come with, we’re there to assist them,” she said.
For the event, she said she deliberately chose not to invite guest speakers from well established organisations, as done before, but rather from the community – people seen every day.
Discussions around various forms of abuse and how to identify them were held, with children seated in the front row.
Light refreshments were served, and those present were given a platform to share their stories.
Woodlands Ratepayers' Association and Community Policing Forum secretary Morrice Kok said the onus was on parents to create non-violent homes and win the respect of their children. “It starts in our own homes; we as parents are the ones that cause these problems nowadays,” he said.
“My father was abusive and we never had a peaceful night once that I can remember until my matric year. But what I’ve learnt in life … is that it’s not only the physical abuse that our parents went through, there was abuse that we as children went through, that we couldn't speak about.”
Johanna Albertus, 74, from Woodlands, said her musician husband, who had meant everything to her, was also the cause of her many bruises.
“He hit me in the evenings when he came home,” she said. They had been married for 43 years.
Choosing to remain anonymous, a 43-year-old woman said: “I was abused through my brothers and sisters. I don't have a mother anymore, I don't have a father but God raised me up to be strong, to be a fighter – to fight against what was happening to me in my house and in my area. I was fighting for my life. I had to fight with them, call the cops – it didn’t help.”
She was raped at the age of 16 and then twice again.
“I would walk past people and they’d think, ‘Look at how she looks again, look at her face’, but they didn’t know what happened to me. Now I’m telling you what happened. It wasn’t easy and it can happen to any of these children. I have a daughter that it happened to. The same thing happened to her, but I was there for my child.”
Cape Argus