‘We will keep fighting until all girls, women are free – there is no other way’

Founder Rock Girl India Baird and the Matric Rock Girls (Ferlin du Preez, LeeAnn Jenkins, Kelly Petersen, Miche Williams, Audrey February, Sharon Dass and Nazeerah Davids)

SHE was 10. Together with a few other girls, she decided to make her school and community safer. She was tired of staying indoors because it was too dangerous to play outside – teenage boys and men catcalling, throwing stones, making unwanted advances, gangs fighting over turf, men lurking on the streets.

The girls formed a group, then an NGO, Rock Girl, and together rallied support for an art room, a new school, weekend and holiday camps and leadership training. Two years ago, she and the other girls took to the road, travelling across the country to talk to other girls, inspire them, support them, and tell them they didn’t have to live in fear.

She spoke on radio countless times, wrote news and magazine articles and spoke about the need for a country where all girls are free from sexual and physical violence. She met ministers and prosecutors, magistrates and a Constitutional Court justice.

Despite all her efforts, she was mugged and groped on taxis on her way to school; she hid under her bed as gangs shot in the streets.

But she remained strong, she had a support system of sisters, old and young.

Today, Taryn (not her real name) is finishing matric, having received multiple awards at her school’s valedictory award ceremony, proving that she, a girl from Manenberg, cannot only survive, but thrive.

She still lives in fear, but she is on her way to university to become a lawyer, to continue battling to make her country, her community, her own life free from fear and crime. She has built a sisterhood and it sustains her despite everything.

She was 10. A little girl, a daughter, a sister, innocently walking to school in Manenberg. Grown men – adults who should be caring for the young people in their community, some who have children of their own – grabbed her, assaulted her, beat her violently.

She was left dead in a shallow ditch, her brief young life over before she had the chance to thrive, to join a sisterhood, to be free.

Little Charnelle McCraw’s life was full of promise, but in an instant men took it from her.

Academic and author Pumla Dineo Gqola wrote in June 2003: “It is ironic and deeply painful that although South Africa is now a democracy, girls and young women continue to be under attack in their own communities and homes. While there were systems in place which worked to terrorise us as black girls growing up during apartheid, both from the state and from some people in our various communities, there appear to be fewer spaces for little girls and young women growing up today.”

How true. Even more so today. It is more than femicide against individual girls and women; it feels like a genocide against women and girls, no matter their race, their ethnicity, their class. Money, skin colour, religion and culture are no defence against this epidemic of violence.

Gqola and many other activists, authors and academics have worked tirelessly to create another narrative, to educate, to inform, to end this pervasive violence against girls and women and against members of the LGBTI community.

Girls learn the word “rape” before they enter school. The rapes, the murders are brutal, senseless, inhumane – and despite the efforts of some of us, they keep happening. Every single day.

On our Rock Girl Road Trips, we have heard story after story of sexual violence, of rape, of domestic abuse, acts committed by those who the girls love and those they don’t know.

The recent #MeToo campaign was no surprise – we have been urging women and girls to speak out since our very first Safe Space bench was created in 2011. Speaking out is needed – but we are tired of speaking after the fact, after the rape, when it is too late for the pain, the trauma, the injuries to be forgotten.

We have called for a Truth and Reconciliation-type hearing countrywide so everyone can share their stories, but we all know the failings when perpetrators fail to come forward.

We want justice. In Rwanda, after the genocide, rapists were tried and found guilty as war criminals – it was the first time this had happened anywhere, despite rape being a tool of war for centuries.

In South Africa we have sexual offences legislation, we have sexual offences courts. We have trained prosecutors and detectives and Thuthuzela care centres. But on a case-by-case basis, we are not winning. We are not preventing rape from happening.

Our most senior government leaders, elected by us, get away with it. Maybe we need a Rape Tribunal – as it feels like we are at war.

What will it take? We don’t know. Our director, even after years of working as a lawyer, an activist and an educator with girls and women, and with boys and men, only knows that we must keep working to find answers.

But what we do know is that with programmes that keep girls safe, help them stay at school and get to and from school safely, we can create more women leaders who will not tolerate the current status quo, who will demand an end to it.

Only 8% of girls on the African continent start university – we are changing that so that we can become leaders and create a just, equal and safe society.

This is a long-term campaign – many of us may not live to see it succeed.

But alongside women like Nandipho Mntampho, Zanele Maholi, Lindeka Qampi, Pregs Govender, Kate O’Regan, Marike Keller, Lovell Friedman, Thuli Madonsela, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Phiwe Badaza, all the other Rock Girls, our mothers, our sisters, our friends and so many, many others we wish we could name here, we will keep fighting until all girls and women are truly free.

There is no other way.