Kenalemang Notwane is a 25-year-old wheelchair bound woman from Tswelelang township in Wolmaransstad, North West. Yesterday she made an impassioned plea to the government to do more in the fight against gender-based violence and femicide.
Notwane was born handicapped on her legs. She said that she had witnessed her father beat her mother from the time she was a young child. She claimed she saw the battle unfold while feeling powerless due to her condition. Notwane said she is still battling to recover from the trauma of watching her father beat up her mother.
“I grow resentful when I watch people fighting, and it reminds me of what happened to my mother,” she said.
She spoke during the North West provincial commemoration of 16 Days of Activism for no Violence Against Women and Children. Her story moved many people when she described how her mother, after being beaten by her father, would go to the police to file a report, only to have her father return a few days later and beat her much more severely.
Whenever my father drank too much, she remarked, “I knew that dishes would fly throughout the house; I knew that I would hear my mother scream.” Notwane pleaded with the government to work hard on developing strategies to protect GBV victims.
This week President Cyril Ramaphosa released a statement on GBV and said the men of South Africa owe it to the women and children of this country to take up the struggle against gender-based violence.
Ramaphosa said this in the light of recent crime statistics, close to a thousand women were killed between July and September, while 1200 or more survived attempts on their lives during the same period, while more than 3000 were brutally assaulted.
However, Ramaphosa said the statistics show some of the successes of the criminal justice system in bringing perpetrators to book. He said in the reporting period, the SAPS Family Violence, Child Protection, and Sexual Offences units arrested over 4,000 alleged perpetrators of gender-based violence, and 410 alleged rapists were traced and arrested. He said more than 17,000 trial-ready GBV cases were processed by SAPS and the National Prosecuting Authority teams.
