EFF women march to demand judges up their game on rape and abuse

Women from the Economic Freedom Fighters have demanded the retraining of judges to better handle rape and sexual abuse cases.

In a march to Constitution Hill to hand over a memorandum on Thursday, a large group of women in party apparel demanded that rape and sexual abuse cases be handled differently by the judicial system.

One cannot handle rape cases as one does other criminal investigations, EFF MP Natasha Ntlangwini said.

“You can’t run a court if in your own home you practise a homophobic mindset. You can’t run a court if in your own house you abuse your wife. We are here to demand them [judges/justices] to be retrained. They must come here and acknowledge their mistake on how they abuse women when they go and report rape cases.

“Our women are terrified of courts. They are even more terrified of courts than police stations because courts need you to explain how you were raped. You need to remember what colour panty you were wearing. That is abuse of the highest note. It must be stopped. We are here to say rape cases and abuse cases cannot be handled the same way as a shoplifting case. We need a better court system to deal with rape victims because our women are scared.”

Hundreds of women took to the streets in the march to deliver a memorandum to Constitutional Court manager Hlengani Thomas Rikhotso, who received the memorandum on behalf of the court.

The EFF’s Gauteng chairperson, Mandisa Mashego, said the march was to deliver the list of demands as a message to the entire judiciary, for them to be trained from magistrate upwards.

“As the highest court in the land, they must take responsibility for the low conviction rates of child abuse and sexual abuse cases.”

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