Someone is hurting women, and it’s not Casper, the Friendly Ghost!

‘We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at the term violence against women, nobody is doing it to them. It happens to them … men aren’t a part of it.” – Jackson Katz.

I love the fact that someone was able to contextualise the error in the simple mistake of omitting that violence against women has to be committed by someone. We read that a hundred and something children are pregnant.

Need we remind each other that there were men who did this impregnating? Violence against women – we are certainly not doing this injustice to ourselves, someone is hurting us, and there is also an injustice in not appropriating blame to the relevant demographic. Let’s face it, it is not Casper the Friendly Ghost!

We are not fixing the problem and we are failing the hundreds of thousands of women who are being violated – by the bogey man, of course!

Fathers are not teaching their sons to be men and we have mothers thinking they can be both mother and father – a boy needs a man to teach him to be a real man.

The status quo will remain because our checks and balances are simply non-existent. Look at the prostitution and the human trafficking industry.

We are quick to say that these are loose women with questionable morals. These are women hooked on drugs and looking to make easy money.

Their clients are faceless, genderless and nameless people … they do not exist.

They are a category of society we will never know because we are so busy counting how many women are being sold and traded for the industry, we do not count how many men are buying them for their selfish gratification.

I agree the blame game can only get us so far as a society, but the appropriation of responsibility allows for us to diagnose the problem, probably medicate and help it to heal.

As is, we carry on as though there is a wound that does not need healing, but that will only make it get worse and fester.

Kekeletso Nakeli-Dhliwayo