Let’s ensure that women no longer have to live in fear

What is it about South Africa that makes it a country so prone to violence? Is it our unequal past, our economic plight or simply our genealogy?

I pondered these questions as I learnt with outrage the ever-increasing number of women brutally abused, tortured and eventually killed, in most cases by their intimate partners.

In one month, five young women were murdered in Bramley, Johannesburg, and Soweto. As a father myself this is a reality that I have difficulty with.

It is shocking to learn that one in every four women is physically abused and every six hours a woman is killed by her intimate or former intimate partner.

Shocking indeed, considering the fact that we live in one of the most liberal countries in the world, where women are supposedly protected by a full range of rights in the constitution – the right to life, dignity and privacy, among others. Freedom and democracy, however, mean nothing if one lives in fear.

Women in our society live in constant fear of their lives. Fear to go to work, fear to go for a morning jog, fear to pass by the taxi rank, fear to go to the shops at night. She is fundamentally scared to live.

While we welcome and appreciate the president and government’s call for violent acts against women to be declared priority crimes, the number of murders and people in jails warns us that a retributive approach to this subject has proven to be ineffective in deterring offenders from committing crimes.

In this day and age, a more holistic and integrated approach is likely to yield sustainable results. The spate of xenophobia, racism, violent public protests and genderbased violence are symptoms that South Africa seems to be a country at war with itself.

This violence is damaging the very gains made by the transition from the apartheid era to democracy. Yet we seem to accept fatal male violence as an inevitability, not a conscious decision that a man has made to end a woman’s life.

This dangerous culture needs to change. Lest we wish to emulate femicide-riddled countries like Argentina, where 31 women are killed every hour, according to La Casa Del Encuentro’s report on femicide.

It is time that everyone stood up and said it is enough. Enough with the abuse, enough with the rape, enough with the name calling and enough with the violence. The place to start is within families and communities.

Families are primary spaces where notions of relations and gender are enacted. Unequal divisions between men and women, black and white and so on, are created at an early age within the family.

The Zulu proverb “umzungulu ugotshwa usemanzi” refers to focusing on the young generation and teaching them values and principles at an early age.

In light of everything happening in our society today, I find this proverb relevant. It is in family settings where ideas of masculinity and femininity are constructed and reinforced. It is therefore in the family where we should be focusing on changing problematic views on gender and subjugation of women.

The problematic views of men as dominant and disciplinarians produce unequal relationships between women and men.

There is, therefore, a need to integrate the gender equality aspect into family and community interventions or programmes.

We need to make sure that community programmes and interventions across all cultures send a clear message to all that women in this country have formal recognition as equal citizens.