It’s the whole country’s responsibility to eradicate femicide

DEAFENING is the silence of our leadership in the face of mounting distress regarding recent public awareness of violence against women. It has been a tough two weeks for us as a nation – our skeletons are breaking through the fragile doors of our closets as the scourge of abuse of women and children finally reaches the public domain.

It seems that, suddenly, newspapers, news bulletins, radio stations and social media platforms are teeming with gruesome stories and images of mutilated female bodies, murdered girlfriends and raped children. As the national conversation becomes louder, women naturally become paralysed with fear for themselves, their daughters, and friends.

All the while, we are inundated by shocking statistics, reminding us that South Africa has the highest incidence of gender-based violence in the world. A woman is murdered every eight hours by an intimate partner. Statistics also estimate that 40% of women in this country will be raped in their lifetime, which, if true, suggests that the reporting rate for rape is roughly one in 20.

The Safety Lab, a social innovation research NGO in Cape Town, found that most police and health-based services are not only poorly managed and conducted, but in many cases, nonexistent.

The recent murder of Karabo Mokoena finally sparked national outrage and has seemingly resuscitated us from our usual coma of desensitisation, perhaps a coping mechanism for a nation trapped in a perpetual trauma cycle.

But why now? Our country is continually violent, often in the top 10 globally for all major types of violence. Has this constant violence lulled South Africans into a civil inertia that has come to tolerate violence as the status quo?

In the context of our trudge towards a healthy democracy, our voices have been amplified by access to social media platforms where citizens can report incidents, express their disdain, and help each other articulate and give meaning to their shared sense of desperation.

Information has become democratised and the speed at which it is disseminated continues to accelerate. The faces of victims are no longer hidden in the obscurity of poverty and marginalisation, neatly tucked away for us to ignore.

Now, there are well-made-up faces on our Instagram feeds, making them real and the danger clear. In some instances, the shock seems to become more inflamed by how beautiful the victim was, more than the inhumanity of the act itself, suggesting that a woman’s beauty determines the magnitude of the tragedy.

Reduced to hashtags such as #yellowbone, this inappropriate and objectifying rhetoric further highlights the inherent sexism and misogyny still prevalent in South African culture and society, some of whose members have been given the critical task of disentangling our communities from the grip of systemic inequality, oppression and violence.

When women are humiliated by officials and met with statements such as “Go home and sort it out with you partner” or “What did you do to make him angry?”, it drastically reduces the chances of reporting these terrible crimes before they escalate to murder.

Yet, an even more debasing reality is playing itself out beneath the recent uproar: the disempowering malaise of leadership. Often subtle and pervasive, our leaders are failing their responsibility to facilitate public discourse, articulate our failures and manage our crisis towards solutions. The silence is crippling, and the head-in-sand syndrome only exacerbates the problem.

Conversing with a friend a few days ago, we could hardly bear imagining what women without the luxury or the resources to attend to their trauma must experience – living with unrepentant perpetrators around the corner, and police unable or unwilling to intervene. Women on media platforms share similar sentiments, asking for a response from Minister of Women in the Presidency Susan Shabangu, the ANC Women’s League and countless others in positions of power to communicate a way forward.

The responsibility falls on us all, women and leaders in the private sector, education, civil society, legal institutions, NGOs, families and churches. Our efforts are bankrupt without your assurance that we are heard, seen and felt. We need you to show up and employ the real resources at your disposal to bring an end to this femicide. Most importantly, men need to be at the forefront of this change, in thought, conversation and behaviour.