Using women’s pain as a weapon reinforces the toxic cycle of domestic abuse 

There is so much wrong with politicians wielding domestic abuse as a weapon in their petty bickering.

It reduces a devastating pandemic that touches millions of South Africans on a deeply intimate level to the subject of schoolyard snipes.

In parliament on Tuesday, during the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) response to the State of the Nation address, ANC MP Boy Mamabolo asked EFF leader Julius Malema if he had abused his wife, prompting Malema to retaliate by accusing President Cyril Ramaphosa of having abused his ex-wife, the late Nomazizi Mtshotshisa.

The exchange has since spilled out of the protected realm of parliament and sparked potential civil action, with Malema and his wife each suing Mamabolo for R1 million.

It has also garnered widespread criticism on social media – and rightly so. Domestic abuse, like so many other forms of gender-based violence, is a heinous manifestation of the archaic idea that a woman is somehow a man’s property.

And when men like Mamabolo and Malema use the horror of domestic abuse as currency with which to buy their high horses, they reinforce that base idea and perpetuate the cycle of toxicity that domestic abuse feeds off.

And they do so with utter disregard – on every level – for those, who they would have the masses believe, they were standing up for. And for their children, some of whom are minors.

It doesn’t matter whether or not the allegations are substantiated.

If they are victims of domestic abuse, women and their children are entitled to have their identities protected.

SA law, through the Domestic Violence Act, recognises that domestic abuse matters demand sensitivity by barring the publication of the names of parties involved in court proceedings.

And if they are not victims of domestic abuse, women and their children are entitled to be left to go about their daily lives in peace, without becoming fodder for the gossip mongers.

The constitution – the same constitution that Mamabolo and Malema took an oath to uphold and sit in parliament, with the purpose of upholding – provides that “everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected”, as well as identifies the best interests of children as paramount in every matter.

Mamabolo and Malema were either ignorant, callous or simply lying when they made those accusations in their capacities as public officials on a very public platform.

Any which way you look at it, it’s disgraceful.

And in South Africa, where gender-based violence in all its forms is so alarmingly high, any which way you look at it, this kind of behaviour is dangerous.

It risks discrediting an important cause and gone are the days when this kind of subjugation was in any way that mattered, considered acceptable.

Bernadette Wicks.

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