Hi bloggers

So, the past weekend has been a traumatizing one for people in my country where the same awareness was raised against Femicide.

In South Africa femicide is a real problem where many women die in the hands of men they date, their family members and friends or complete strangers.

There is great fear of being a woman, because you don’t know if you will make it home, when you leave the house. Recently because of the lockdown, many cases have been reported, the current one that moved the nation was the murder of a Johannesburg woman named Tshegofatso Pule whose stabbed body was found hanging from a tree last week. This lady was heavily pregnant and because of that there was a public outcry as usual, but nothing is really being done to save the situation, women in the country protest against femicide, violence against women, gender-based violence and nothing changes.

South African women live constant danger, many are being raped, abused and killed by their partners in brutal and inhumane ways. It is the same men we love that hurt us the most. Our voices are honestly not being heard loud enough because these brutal events against women are continuous.

We as women get reminded that our chances of dying a natural death are slim because we are women and we live in South Africa. Gender based violence has EVERYTHING to do with you as a female. Directly and indirectly. Your silence is danger to everyone affected.

In South Africa we simply are not afforded the time to mourn a female’s tragic death. Why? Because it simply gets passed on to someone else. A new name. A new face. Another female.

South Africa has become the world femicide capital. Judges are increasingly taking this element into account when delivering justice, but it doesn’t seem to do anything to perpetrators.

Women are robbed of their freedom, it is well known that a woman cannot walk alone after dark because there are high chances, she will either be robbed, raped or killed.

It is exasperating that regardless of the noise we make, women face the same threat from the same people, who are meant to protect them and are confronted by a community that sometimes protects the perpetrator making misconceptions of why men rape, kill, and beat women up . This continues because we have rape apologists that protect their friends who hurt women.

To name a few, these misconceptions include:

• men can’t control their anger or sexual urges;
• alcohol causes men to be violent;
• women could leave violent partners if they wanted to; and
• men experience equal, if not greater, levels of violence perpetrated by their partners or former partners.

There are many misconceptions surrounding violence against women, including how and why it occurs. We need to address these misconceptions to be successful in our responses to violence against women. Men need to stop killing women, there is nothing more we can say, its disgusting that someone can sleep with a woman by force and blame it on alcohol. Men need to learn self-control, that is it. Men need to learn to value women and maybe that can be the beginning of change.

We are really tired.