Bliss of not living in fear of attacker
● Sibongile Tshabalala regards the 17 knife wounds inflicted on her by her former lover as a blessing.
She could have ended up bitter or even vengeful. Instead, the 32-year-old from Vosloorus in Gauteng has a new lease of life after coming face to face with the man who brutalised her in 2010.
Tshabalala lives next to the man who stabbed her 17 times, dragged her on a tar road and clobbered her with a brick before setting himself alight.
She no longer lives in fear of her attacker — the father of her two children and her ex-fiancé — who served two years and four months of his seven-year sentence for kidnapping and attempted murder.
This week she said the crime statistics — 2,930 women and 985 children were killed between April 2017 and March 2018 — was a grim reminder of how easily she could have become just a number.
The man was released from the Boksburg prison on parole after submitting himself to a restorative justice programme facilitated by NGO Khulisa Social Solutions, where he met with her to repent and ask for forgiveness.
Khulisa has dealt with 15,000 restorative justice cases since 2002, at all levels of the crime cycle, including pretrial, post-sentence incarceration and the release of offenders.
In 2012, the government’s justice, crime prevention and security cluster formally adopted the restorative justice approach because “the current punitive system, that is, the system of punishing people for crimes committed seems to have only limited success”, the department of justice said.
George Kowlock Thom of Khulisa Social Solutions said: “There was a time when it was thought restorative justice only worked in minor and usually property-related offences. But over the past 40 years, it has been shown that restorative justice processes can be implemented even in the most heinous crimes, such as rape, murder, attempted murder and robbery.”
The attack on Tshabalala came one night after she arrived home from work, soon after having ended the relationship. She didn’t realise she had been stabbed until he bundled her into the boot of a family friend’s car and drove off.
Tshabalala escaped, but came under attack again when he beat her with a brick outside the home of an unknown woman, who raised the alarm. He drove to Nigel where he consumed petrol and set himself alight, but he survived.
In prison he reached out to Tshabalala. “I went secretly to prison to meet with him twice. [Then] Khulisa facilitated sessions with us and our families.
“I was very nervous when I heard he was coming to live next to me. But my father told me not to run away and face my fears.”
They tried to get reconciled, but this failed. “The one thing I can say is that I no longer fear him.”