Skirts are too short, pants are too tight, or it’s a ‘power thing’. We are taught from an early age to sit ‘properly’, comport ourselves as ladies, and to be demure. We glow instead of sweat, we are sugar and spice and all things nice.
It’s all part of the biblically old patriarchal system designed to keep women in their place, pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen, a lady in public and a whore in bed.
Don’t be shocked. Many men view women as nothing more than a receptacle for their pleasure. And when access to a woman’s body is denied, she is slut-shamed, called a tease, or as is often the case, raped. And it’s almost always by someone known to the woman.
Just some of the brutal crimes to rock South Africa in recent weeks include the brutal rape of an 11-year-old girl in Soweto, the savage rape, torture, and murder of a 26-year-old woman in Thokoza, and a 14-year-old boy hacked his family to death with an axe, all female bar a younger brother.
In Zandspruit, children march in protest against child abuse. Seriously? Somewhere, somehow, something has gone incredibly wrong with society when pre-primary school children march against child abuse.
So it’s not just women under attack, it’s our children too. We teach our little boys and girls about body privacy, the ‘bad touch’, and keeping away from strangers. Then reports of senior citizens being raped surface and one has to wonder, what is going on?
It’s no longer a matter of simply keeping ones knees together and dressing like a nun. Lesbians are raped ‘to show them what they’re missing’, uncles rape nieces, step-fathers rape step-children, and children rape children.
What is it that allows perpetrators of vicious gender crimes to think they can escape censure? Is it the inadequate sentencing handed down by the courts? Is it the idea that women ‘ask for it’? Because if children have to stand up and say hands off, then the problem simply cannot be the victims.
Yes, I wrote about this in February. The silence has been deafening. Silence is assent. Silence is approval.
Until more men act against sexual violence, they may as well be cheering it on.
