Education and training key to fighting gender-based violence and femicide
Non-profit organisation CEO wants to see police officers trained better on handling GBV cases.
Free World Initiative founder and CEO Lebogang Motau writes:
Free World Initiative (FWI) is an organisation that is working with communities to raise responsible men in hopes of eradicating gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) in our lifetime.
The organisation was founded by me, Lebogang Motau as a survivor.
No woman should have to experience the violation I had to go through, and I promised myself that I would hold the hands of victims as they navigate the justice system and work their way from being a victim to a survivor.
Our goal is so no woman ever has to hear that her screaming and crying was mistaken for pleasure.
I am definitely not happy with the current state of GBVF in South Africa, it shows a great need for us to start focusing on the underlying issues of being a nation that comes from a long history of violence to the point of it being normalised, media has now even romanticised rape, though the scenes we see of men coercing women into having sex.
As a country we need intervention to start looking at the psychological aspect of what is driving GBV, we need to work with both victims and perpetrators and work on healing the survivor and change the behaviour of the perpetrators. Statistics currently show that most victims will be re-victimised and that one in 10 perpetrators will repeat the offence, so we have to pay attention and break the cycle.
South Africa has been named the rape capital of the world by Interpol and the fifth most dangerous country for women to live in. One in four women will be sexually assaulted in their life time. A woman is raped every 25 seconds; 45% of the rapes reported to the police are child victims; 9 516 rape cases were opened with SAPS between April and June 2022. You are more likely to be raped than to get a job in South Africa as a woman. Only one in nine report, most women feel the process of reporting leads to re-traumatisation and prefer to just ‘forget’ about what happened. South Africa has a huge challenge converting those reported cases into conviction, and are sitting with a conviction rate of under 9%.
Our judicial system is too lenient on perpetrators – they easily get bail, giving them an opportunity to intimidate victims, or pay off officers so case files go missing, leading to cases being dropped. As much as 82% of rapes are by someone known by the victim, making it that much harder for the victim to report, in fear for their safety.
The country and the world need to change the narrative. The focus has always been on teaching women and girls how to protect themselves; we teach women to walk away from abusive relationships; how to dress and act, so they are not provocative, but nothing is being said to men about not raping and abusing because society believes ‘boys will be boys’.
We have a long way in our fight to eradicate GBVF, it starts with education, changing toxic masculinity and training – of police officers on how to deal with a survivor and gathering of evidence to provide the prosecutors with solid cases that lead to convictions.
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