Take gender violence seriously

PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the nation this week: at some stage our lockdown regulations will be further relaxed; restaurants and some hotels will open; non-contact sports will resume; casinos and theatres will reopen. But you still can’t buy cigarettes, or visit your family.

In the same breath, he bemoaned South Africa’s other pandemic – gender-based violence.

Unlike Covid-19, he gave us no roadmap for dealing with the surge in the number of cases that we have seen, but unlike Covid-19 which was in truth unexpected, gender-based violence is no surprise.

We have been brushing it under the carpet for years. Our regulations for flattening the curve of the infection might well be wholly nonsensical sometimes as they spectacularly were this week, but at least they exist.

Those same regulations have also been zealously enforced by our security forces.

We have never been able to say the same about the actual laws that apply to the safety of women, whether it was the Constitution, the common law or even the Domestic Violence Act.

Far too often men – and it’s always men – get away with beating and killing their partners despite all the laws, because we simply don’t take it seriously enough.

The president was right to call this our other pandemic, but the question is: What is his administration going to do about it?

It’s a rhetorical one because, much like its epidemiological cousin, Ramaphosa has actually already given us the answer: it’s in our hands, literally.

As much as the only real chance we have to stay uninfected as Covid-19 threatens to break over us is by observing basic hygiene, keeping our distance and wearing a mask, so, too, it is with genderbased violence.

We have to stop looking the other way but, most of all, we have to stop hitting and killing women.