It records one of the worst rates of violence against them in the world
Violence against women in South Africa is a deepening crisis, exacerbated by official impotence
Natalie (not her real name) is a victim of gender-based violence in her room at a care center for battered women in a suburb of Johannesburg.
AFP
An employee looks after a child at St Anne's Orphanage, a shelter for abused children and women in Cape Town.
AFP
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Women in orange jackets roam a slum in South Africa with a high crime rate, taking to the homes and streets to carry out a grueling "Sexual Violence Units" mission to raise awareness of a pervasive social problem in the country.
The South African government has ranked combating this pest among its priorities, but it seems unable to stop it given the huge number of cases reported.
"We cannot sit idly by and wait for the judiciary to do the work required of it," says activist Julien Ngonyama, 52, especially with the spread of domestic violence cases since the start of the "Covid-19" pandemic.
In pairs, the activists stop any person they encounter on the road, both men and women, to assure them that “gender-based violence constitutes abuse with multiple facets: emotional, physical, financial and psychological.”
South Africa has one of the worst rates of violence against women in the world.
crimes
The country witnesses more than 100 rapes every day, and murders kill a woman every three hours, according to official figures.
Between July and September, rape cases increased by 7.1% with 9,556 registered complaints, excluding unreported rape crimes.
"These numbers are shameful," South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said last month, describing gender-based violence as a "parallel pandemic" to Covid.
He explained, "It is a fierce war on women's bodies, and it does not seem to be on the way back despite our efforts," adding, "If the level of any nation is measured by the way women and children are treated, we are very far from what is required."
The coordinator of the "units to combat gender-based violence" Senocha Malesila explains that this initiative was launched last August in the Johannesburg region "in order for victims to be contacted at home through a home-roaming campaign."
On that day, residents of Rabbie Ridge reported that a 22-year-old woman had been abused by her brother.
Because of her great fear of revealing the details to the volunteers because he is nearby, the woman leaves her number for them to be contacted by the unit members later.
Many like her end up living under the same roof with the abuser, in shelters designated for this category of society, but South Africa has only about 100 of them, and these institutions sometimes receive little public assistance.
Home stone prisoners
Among these shelters is the Women's Center in the slum of Linasia, near Johannesburg, which was established in the same month with the fall of the apartheid regime in the country.
The director of the center, Gladys Mmadintsi, 57, says that the place has not been emptied since April 1994, so that "the situation is getting worse" instead of improving.
In Cape Town, in the far south of the country, the St Ann shelter has also recorded a rise in domestic violence cases in the past two years.
During a recent visit by Agence France-Presse journalists, a woman arrived during the night, while another went with two children, one of whom was a baby, in the morning.
Shelter director Joy Lange explains that home quarantine measures have forced a greater number of women to leave the house.
"Before, victims could have recreated themselves by going to work," she says, but the level and "severity" of violence have increased since the pandemic began.
In September, parliament passed three laws to strengthen the arsenal of deterrent laws, but activists say they do not address the root causes of the problem.
Father A Nation founder Craig Wilkinson explains that men in South Africa often grow up without a father and are also exposed to violence.
He says that patriarchal misconceptions and high unemployment rates constitute "a confluence of explosive factors."
"No law can fix broken, broken men," he added, also referring to the remnants of the apartheid era in the country.
He points out that the law alone is like “placing a lid on a pressure cooker. The pressure level must be controlled so that it does not explode.”
He says: "We (...) remind men of their values, reform them, and teach them to use their power" in the right place.
• The country witnesses more than 100 rapes every day, and murders kill a woman every three hours, according to official figures.
• During September, Parliament passed three laws to strengthen the arsenal of deterrent laws, but activists believe that they do not address the roots of the problem.
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