BRUTAL KILLING OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN AND GENDER BASED VIOLENCE DURING LOCKDOWN
21- June-2020 Sefikile village Moses Kotane Local Municipality Christinah Mogobye
Last month on my post titled “The selling of alcohol during lockdown” I stated some few issues that leads to women abuse. Alcohol abuse and women abuse were amongst these issues. Since the president gave go-ahead on alcohol selling, cases of women abuse and brutal killings of women’s rate has risen.
Many have lost their jobs, having debts and other commitments, mostly men, they end up taking it out on the poor women who are powerless, voiceless and defenceless. But justice needs to be served and it begins with us Activists, to unite and see how we can assist, because there is this saying that goes like “Justice delayed is justice denied.
What do we do to help the community? We need to be The Voices to the voiceless, we cannot ignore it and say “no, it has not happened in my community”, we don’t know what is happening behind closed doors and the only way to find out is to find out while adhering to the government Covid19 rules because other community workers are on duty we also can.
I spoke to ausi Mpho who is the Home-based worker and asked her if she can help identifying households who experience such problems and she said there is absolutely no harm in doing that because the community needs Activists and home-based workers who will work hand in hand to bring justice for the oppressed community members. There was a child who was begging to go back to school and rather be infected because she could not stand the abuse at home as the father is still on lockdown, not getting paid and abusing alcohol.
It is a sad situation that such a young child would wish to risk her life because she could not stand the abuse and uncomfortable situation at home. Although we cannot use alcohol and lockdown as an excuse but these abusive men also need to be helped because most of them are affected by this lockdown as they can’t provide for their families. They need to be assisted with anger management lessons or programmes and I believe that we as activists can be part of that and with my patriarchal lessons offered by Benchmark it would be easier to do that.
It takes one or more activist to help stop Gender-based violence.
