Gender-Based Violence should be fought at community level: Maluleke

The Director General of the Department of Women, Youth and People with Disabilities has called for the fight against Gender-Based Violence (GBV) to be focused at the community level.

Joyce Maluleke says that all leaders of society, including church and traditional leadership, must work to resocialise communities in order to prevent GBV.

“Part of the challenge is penetrating some of these homes where these crimes are perpetuated so one of the things we need to do in terms of this concept means is that we need to start rolling out evidence-based programmes. We need to actually scale them. And some of these programmes include parenting programmes and they are driven by the Department of Social Development so we can’t deal with this scourge if we don’t drive that leadership in families.”

GBV and Femicide

South Africa’s violent history has been identified as one of the contributing factors to the high numbers of GBV and Femicide in the country.

This formed part of the discussions at a two-day conference hosted by the Commission of Gender Equality that seeks to reflect and find solutions to advance gender equality and a non-sexist society 30 years into democracy.

Despite ongoing discussions and reports on the the high levels of violence against women and children in the country, Clinical Psychologist Nkhabele Marumo believes there is little understanding of gender-based violence and femicide – saying it is often a manifestation of the post-apartheid era trauma.

“I think in 1994, in our quest to make everybody happy, we sort of sickened ourselves a bit. The TRC did not go far enough to sort of like say, what are we inheriting? And I think as I work with people and I look at structural violence and some of the military veterans who were exposed to violence, women who have been electrocuted a lot of things and some people are sitting with psychosis that they can’t make sense of and here we are trying to make sense of why are we here.”

Related video of GBV-Femicide Bill 

Teaching boy child

Founder of NGO Father of a Nation Craig Wilkinson is optimistic that South Africa can claw back its humanity advocating the teaching and training of the boy child.

“No boy is born an abuser, no boy comes out of his mother’s womb to abuse or to be a racist or to be anything like that. These things are learnt, something happens on the journey from a boy to a man. The instinct of a healthy man is to protect, never ever to abuse. So, we’ve got to ask what goes wrong in the journey from boy to man and for me, that’s what we’ve been focusing on from father to man, we have a beautiful team on the ground, working with men because a healthy whole man leads to a healthy whole society.”

Meanwhile, Josina Machel has called for government and society alike to account. Machel, herself a survivor of GBV, says concerted efforts of government, business and civil society are lacking in dealing with gender-based violence as evidenced by delays in implementing the April 2019 National Strategic Plan on the issue.

“Where is the sense of urgency when it comes to GBV that’s why we are looking at the National Strategic Plan and we are having the council only being approved now right that is why we look at the National Strategic Plan and we say there are no funds but really when we human look at certain issues and we look at death like that the truth with Gender Based violence is that that is not happening.”

[Related video] 30 years of women’s development: Adv. Joyce Maluleke