Dear parents, use the lockdown to teach your sons to be better future men

Dear parents,

On the 2nd of April, Police Minister  Bheki Cele said the police received more than 87,000 gender-based violence complaints during the first week of the 21-day national lockdown.

I was saddened, but not completely surprised. I subscribe to the school of thought that believes that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Adults are typically set in their ways, habits and thinking. Whether they are right or wrong is besides the point.

I hope that during the 21 days you will be teaching your children in practice about the dangers of gender roles in the house. My plea is that your sons (if age allows) should be making their beds, preparing breakfast, cleaning the house and yard, and cooking lunch and supper too.

We need to work together to ensure that the next generation of men are better socialised. I hope that most of you are non-essential workers so that you can monitor and nurture the soft masculinities in your sons.

It will be no time when he is all grown and exuding a lot of entitlement if he goes unchecked. Times have changed. He is not just a child. He is a near future man. He has to be modelled right and guided right.

Your son or sons must not have their humanity stifled by regressive ways like many men who today are discharging toxic masculinities. It all started at home. It started when they were young and told that they don’t belong in the kitchen – that preparing their own meal is unmanly. It all starts with fathers and mothers who try to prescribe to their sons a way of life that robs them of being self-sufficient and growing easily bruised egos.

Teach your sons to look after themselves. Teach them to treat their sisters (younger and older) as their equals (because they are). Misogyny, sexism, male privilege, entitlement and toxic masculinities are not things they randomly pick up in the streets, they are generally taught at home.

It all starts when dad hardly lifts a finger at home, and mom does all the chores in the house while the son is watching. It is when the girl child in the house has to clean, bath, cook and her brother who is older or younger does absolutely nothing. Yet he demands to be fed and cleaned after and yet he does nothing.

The men we see today who are emotionally and physically abusing women are a result of masculinity that went unchecked and unguided.

You don’t believe me? Keep reading.

We don’t have to interrogate the 87,000 calls further to know that the bulk of the calls were made by women. This is because, according to the Medical  Research Council, one in four women in the general  population of South Africa have experienced physical violence at some point in their lives.

Most interestingly, the report further shows that a large proportion of men (Gauteng 78%; Limpopo 48%; Western Cape 35%: and KwaZulu-Natal 41%) admitted to committing violence against women in their lifetime. Furthermore, a national study on female homicide concluded that a woman is killed every six hours by her intimate partner.

We may not be able to change the men who abused the 87,000 women who called the SAPS. Nevertheless, as parents, you have an opportunity to raise the next generation of men better. Do justice to the humanity of your sons during this lockdown. Teach them to be strong, self-sufficient, self-nurturing and self-functioning future men.

As one of my most favourite quotes says” “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” according to Frederick Douglass.

May your sons be better men in the future.

Yours sincerely,

A mentor to the boy child

Kabelo Chabalala is the founder and chairperson of the Young Men Movement (YMM), an organisation that focuses on the reconstruction of the socialisation of boys to create a new cohort of men. Email, kabelo03chabalala@gmail.com; Twitter, @KabeloJay; Facebook, Kabelo Chabalala

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