Another Women's Month, another superficial rundown on general women's issues. But when are we going to confront the proverbial elephant in the room once and for all?
As a nation and a people, we need to rethink our current cosmetic approach on how we protect women in what is supposed to be loving relationships and marriages.
The National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence & Femicide (GBVF) 2020–2030, an ambitious road map towards ending GBVF, as of today, now under five and half years to deadline, is a hare-brained plan.
Intimate partner violence (IPV), as disproportionately perpetrated by men on women, has reached crisis proportions. We need to zone in on the crux that is the scourge of IPV.
IPV should thus be the buzzphrase that ought to rally our zeitgeist, not the broad gender-based violence, or GBVF – as expanded – as it so often happens when things don't work out.
The same strategic plan cites a 2009 national femicide study that “found that 1,024 females were murdered by intimate partners and a further 768 females were killed by a non-partner.”
This large share of IPV cases in GBVF entails an urgent need to take ownership of this strategic approach in a way that is community and family-centred for it to have any impact.
First, the domestic violence or sexual harassment protection order regime, a first-line deterrent, has to be overhauled.
It has no effect in combating this scourge as it is no longer worth the paper it is written on. It is as perfunctory a palaver as an affidavit for a stolen phone, and at worst antagonistic, and is disregarded with impunity.
The most gut-wrenching GBVF cases, in recent years, have been by current lovers and exes – in most cases with protection orders in place.
Reeva Steenkamp (2013), Mary-Lee Mucambe (2014), Jayde Panayiotou (2015), Susan Rohde (2016), Karabo Mokoena (2017), Cacelwa Mapila (2018), Verusha Padayachee (2019), Tshegofatso Pule and Nosicelo Tsipa (2020), Anele Tembe and Liezel de Jager (2021), Sasha Lee Monique Shah (2022), Nadine Terblanche (2023) and Thembekile Charlotte Letlape and Dorcas Lekganyane (2024).
Each of these lives cut short represents three other women murdered daily by their intimate partners, per statistics, in the last decade or so.
One of the most upsetting pleas anyone can read from an abused woman is an application for a protection order.
An excerpt from a real application reads: “I cannot live a normal life with continuous stalking and threats from this man. I do not know what he is capable of as he has a firearm.
“My family and I feel unsafe because he parks outside our house and I have no father to assist.”
And her motivation for urgent protection continued: “Just yesterday, he kidnapped me and told me he will make a big scene if he doesn't get to see me or if I get a new boyfriend. I fear for my life every day with these threats.”
Of course, police never acted on the protection order.
Her “high school sweetheart” made bad on his threat and murdered her. Sasha Lee Monique Shah, a real person, died.
The next talking shop stop, the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence against Women and Children, the flagship awareness campaign of the “Emergency Response Action Plan” on GBVF needs to be reviewed as well.
This is not to say we'll leave children behind, especially the boy child who ought to be conditioned to cut their losses as early as adolescence to formative years of dating. We have to develop programmes to address the culture lag and to teach them to walk away from situations that emasculate on one end and breed misogyny on the other end. The hotbed period for toxic masculinity has the potential to turn them into monsters over time.
This is not to say the envisaged approach should be binary or take the foot off the pedal on chaperoning impressionable young girls into adulthood, or on deaths of oblivious young women like Uyinene Mrwetyana (2019) murdered by non-partner Luyanda Botha, that in any way is bundled into this convoluted and unhelpful definition of IPV in GBVF – that includes “rejected would-be lover” – according to the definition of “intimate femicide”.
We also need to invest in structured shelters for women, and their children, to empower them to readily escape from the clutches of abusive relationships.
We need the government to set up a relief fund in the mold of vex money to buffer women to be better prepared to move on, as soon as possible if not immediately, from a breakdown in relationships and marriages caused by abuse. And not to be held hostage by patriarchal circumstances, not least socioeconomic and financial.
This approach is more than a language change.
• Makgwathane Mothapo consults in the crisis and reputation management space. Follow him on 𝕏 @SocietyNews
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