South Africa only truly wakes up to gender-based violence each time there is a tragic incident. In 2018, a massive women’s shutdown march to the Union Buildings resulted in the so-called strategic plan on GBV. Yet nearly a decade later, GBV barely features in public discourse and certainly not at the top of the public agenda. Unless a Cwecwe is raped or an Olorato Mongale is brutally murdered.
The perpetrators are often powerful people in society who can easily cover their tracks and rebrand. Some examples include teachers. They often quietly leave one school and are hired by another without anyone bothering to check the sexual offenders register. No cross-referencing. A dangerous oversight. A ball dropped.
Another issue is families who cover up GBV to avoid “airing their dirty laundry”, hoping the truth won’t surface. But it always does — often in the most tragic of ways. And by then, it’s too late. Another ball dropped. Recently we saw parents whose car was used to commit crimes seeking to shield their children.
Then there are the friends we keep in our close circle. Our silence is deafening, and this fuels GBV because we encourage inappropriate behaviour among our own friends. This is often done because “we fear discomfort more than injustice”. We hope the problem will disappear if we ignore it long enough. And it’s what makes the public outrage that spills into the streets feel deeply hypocritical because we can isolate these perpetrators, but we won’t do it. We somehow see it as too much trouble to call out our own friends. This is a ball dropped because there is no sense of accountability or shame among us.
The justice system has so far sent a wrong message on key GBV cases. A message that says if you are high profile and with deep pockets you can get away with it. GBV cases are withdrawn all the time, with the NPA declining to prosecute even glaring cases where it is clear that the perpetrators have intimidated the complainants.
Finally, the last ball — institutions that fail to deliver. We don’t hold the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to a standard that corresponds with the crisis. This is why, after eight years of a trial that was in everyone's face, the leaders of the justice cluster are as surprised as all of us about what has gone wrong in the case that was supposed to set an example. This is an own goal once again.
You may think it's obvious that the NPA would want to set an example to deter future offenders from thinking they can use their status in society to get away with murder. The failure to see what looked like an obvious case through is a terrible disservice to the fight against GBV. Our failure to fight GBV with all these own goals is therefore an inside job. We only have ourselves to blame.
Five years ago, a new NPA head was appointed. The appointment was received with much hope and maybe, given the terrible state of the NPA then, she can be said to have achieved a level of stability for an institution that was hollowed out by state capture, but this cannot be a measure of success. The justice system has so far sent the wrong message on key GBV cases. A message that says if you are high profile and with deep pockets you can get away with it. GBV cases are withdrawn all the time, with the NPA declining to prosecute even glaring cases where it is clear that the perpetrators have intimidated the complainants. This inevitably becomes a vicious circle. Surely by now an NPA that sees GBV as a crisis would have come up with strategies to clamp down on these low-hanging fruit. Sadly this apparent ineptness of the NPA is not isolated to GBV cases but shows up on big-ticket cases of massive corruption. By keeping Shamila Batohi despite this glaring failure to stem the GBV fight, government is dropping yet another ball.
But that wouldn’t be the only way it does. The strategic plan adopted under pressure of a lockdown has achieved little if the recent crime statistics of contact crimes such as rape and murder are anything to go by. The billion rand that was set aside over a presidential decree in 2018 was scrapped in four of the so-called SRD grants at the dawn of Covid-19. Politicians casually referred to GBV as a pandemic, but very scant resources are directed to the fight it.
One wonders what it will take for this fight to trigger action akin to a state of emergency, because we have arrived at a point where women are not safe anywhere. Not even in their churches or homes. Who must die first before such a state of emergency? Should it be someone connected to the political elite?
• Prof JJ Tabane is professor of media students at the University of Botswana and a sessional lecturer in media studies at Wits University
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