Annually, the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children is held, which is an international awareness-raising campaign.
South Africa adopted the campaign in 1998 as one of the intervention strategies towards creating a society free of violence. This year’s theme is #HearMeToo: End Violence against Women and Children.
And so, for many years the campaign has tried to raise awareness among South Africans about the negative impact of violence against women and children on all members of the community.
In the end, we have to ask the question: is such a campaign useful? Remember, it is 20 years since its adoption, but sadly one’s response must remain sceptical.
Crimes against women and children still rage on, and it seems their cries for protection, even in their own homes, are either not heard or heeded.
Just take the example of human trafficking, which is but just another form of terrible abuse and torment of women and children.
Africa Check reported in 2016 that a child went missing every nine hours in South Africa.
South Africa has also been identified as a source, transit point and destination of human trafficking victims.
This emerged at the Department of Social Development’s recent Human Trafficking Indaba.
Research findings from a study conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council in 2010 into the Dimensions of Human Trafficking in Southern Africa, showed that women and children, particularly girl children, constitute the largest group of victims trafficked from within the continent and within national borders.
Human trafficking is real, and even here in Ekurhuleni is confirmed by the metro, and so women and children are subjected to unimaginable trauma.
While the Prevention and Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act 7 of 2013 is in place to address human trafficking in South Africa, this form of abuse still poses a real and horrible threat to many.
Also, consider how sexual abuse against women remains rampant, and the Advertiser often reports on this crime in Boksburg.
We will not even talk about all the emotional abuse meted out against women and children.
Last year, the global humanitarian organisation World Vision South Africa at the beginning of National Child Protection Week said the state of violence against South African children should be declared a national disaster.
At the time, the organisation said the country is faced with horrific reports of violence against children daily, which at its current rate will snowball to impact many generations to come.
While abuse is a reality, you would at least think South Africa should have the resources to offer such victims some form of comfort and hope.
This is apparently not so. In a country where 54 000 rape cases are reported annually, it seems nearly half the facilities designated to care for survivors of sexual attacks do not offer counselling to child survivors, who potentially represent almost half of all survivors.
This is according to a report by Doctors Without Borders, which paints a bleak state of access to mental healthcare for survivors of sexual violence.
The survey by the international medical humanitarian organisation also shockingly found that half of these dedicated health facilities offer no counselling services at all.
It also found more than a third of the facilities did not provide risk assessment for suicide, 53 did not provide counselling for child victims, 25 of these facilities said they had no counsellors, while more than half did not offer counselling for victims of intimate partner violence.
Remember Time’s Up? This is the campaign driven by 300 prominent actresses and female agents, writers, directors, producers and entertainment executives, to fight systemic sexual harassment in Hollywood, and in blue-collar workplaces nationwide.
While such an initiative should be lauded, as with the 16 Days of Activism, why then is nothing really changing in our societies?
Day in and day out, children and women remain victims to a nightmare world of abuse and torment, and so many times at the hands of someone they know or love.
What then is the real solution in such a sick and senseless world of violence and in a world of no morals, or respect for life?
One can only hope during the 16 Days of Activism we will all pause for a minute, and ask ourselves how much are we part of the problem, or how much are we part of the solution?
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