South Africa battles 'second pandemic' of rape and abuse

JOHANNESBURG • Donning orange bibs, a group of women fan across a Johannesburg township notorious for crime, knocking on doors and stopping anyone they come across on the streets, including teenagers returning from school.

They are called gender-based violence brigades and their mission is herculean: to confront South Africa's plague of femicide and violence against women and children.

The cases are gruesome, and the numbers are dizzying. A law student was murdered, her body chopped into pieces and stuffed into a suitcase. Another university student was raped and then bludgeoned to death with an industrial weighing scale inside a post office. A woman who was eight months pregnant was hanged from a tree.

"We can't just ignore what we (see) until justice takes its course," said Ms Juliet Ngonyama, 52.

Orange is a symbol of revolution in South Africa. In this case, it symbolises the activists' determination to curb the violence that has worsened since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

South Africa has some of the world's highest levels of violence against women. More than 100 rapes are reported daily, while on average a woman is murdered every three hours, according to official data.

The latest quarterly crime statistics showed a 7.1 per cent increase in rapes, with 9,556 women raped between July and September.

"These statistics are shameful," President Cyril Ramaphosa said last month. He has characterised violence against women as a "second pandemic" after Covid-19.

The Gauteng provincial government started the women's brigades in August last year "to ensure that victims are reached out to in their household through a door-to-door campaign", according to the campaign's coordinator, Mr Senosha Malesela.

"Overall we are seeing an increased number of... cases being opened in police stations," he said.

Parliament in September passed three Bills to tighten its laws on gender-based violence, but advocates say that will not address the causes of the problem.

South African men often grow up without fathers and have also suffered from violence, said Mr Craig Wilkinson, founder of the non-profit organisation Father A Nation. With false notions of masculinity and rampant unemployment, men are in "a perfect storm".

"No amount of law enforcement can fix broken and wounded men," he said. Legislation alone is "like putting a lid on a pressure cooker. There's going to be an explosion. You have got to deal with the pressure", he said, adding: "We need to re-father our men, validate them... teach them how to use their strength."

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE