The most populous District Municipality in the North West province Bojanala Platinum, has recorded the highest Gender Based Violence and Femicide (GBVF) cases in the province.
This was revealed by the Department of Social Development that has since constructed nine GBVF shelters and safe houses throughout the district with the latest one opened about four months ago to house the victims.
The revelation coincides with the launch of the 16 Days of activism for no violence against women and children in Rustenburg by Deputy President Paul Mashatile.
Speaking on YouFM News Hour, the provincial department Acting District Social Work Manager in Bojanala Platinum District Connie Khoza said the police stats in the province on Gender Based Violence and Femicide has skyrocketed.
“As the department we are funding through the victim empowerment programme nine shelters and safe houses.
Two of them are at the Moretele local municipality.
One in Madibeng in Brits, majority of them (four) are in the Rustenburg local municipality and two others at the Moses Kotane local municipality,” said Khoza.
Moreover, Khoza highlighted that the main objectives of the safe houses and shelters is to provide psycho-social support to the GBVF victims.
“Maybe another person can ask Connie what psycho-social support is.
Remember this person is a victim, so she/he is affected psychologically.
Socially we can see that she is being distraught and moved from his/her place of living, so we provide holistically the psycho-social support being food, shelter which are the basic needs,” explained Khoza.
According to Khoza, it is their responsibility as the Department of Social Development to promote and protect the rights of the victim.
“Another objective is to create a safe environment because she/he is from an environment that has abused him or shaken her one way or the other.
So, in terms of services that we are rendering first and foremost its counselling, it’s sheltering and because it’s not like when we have accommodated them, we know everything.
If there are other services our client needs, we refer them to other stakeholders, because GBV is not a one-man show,” highlighted Khoza.
All the nine safe houses and shelters accommodate about 800 GBVF victims for a period of three months.
Because of the high cases of this scourge, we do have a target as the department, and we see about 35 victims on consultation basis who frequent our shelters and safe houses.
But in totality the stats from our district shows that in a quarter we can also treat 894 victims, so one can see that this GBV is very rife in Bojanala,” said
The 16 days campaign is expected to end on the 10th of December.
