Parliament’s gender watchdog spends money on a jazz concert while rural women get no help
Marianne Merten
For more than a year gender activist Joanie Fredericks has knocked on Parliament’s doors trying to raise funds for sexually abused women in the rural Western Cape. “We’ve been trying for more than a year to establish some sort of a helpline for women on farms,” she says. “Give me the money today and I’ll start working this afternoon.” In 1997 the government established what it calls “the gender machinery” to ensure equality and the incorporation of gender considerations in policy and service delivery.
Its structures include the Office on the Status of Women in the presidency, the parliamentary joint standing committee on the improvement of the quality of life and status of women, gender focal points in national and provincial departments and the Commission on Gender Equality. In late 1999 Fredericks returned from the Middle East to her hometown Grabouw in rural Western Cape, where seven years earlier she was sexually harassed while working as the first local woman forklift driver. “My manager always tried to corner me, indicating that if I gave in to him he would promote me,” she said. “If this was happening to me, then surely this must happen to other women?” In 1993 Fredericks became the gender coordinator of the South African Agricultural, Plantation and Allied Workers’ Union (Saapawu). Years after leaving the union in 1996, two cases still stand out. “There was a woman people said was crazy. Then it emerged her husband beat and raped her. No one ever listened to her,” says Fredericks. Another woman lost her job when she separated from her abusive husband, whom she had reported repeatedly to management. A study by the Centre for Rural Legal Studies in the Western Cape two years ago found at least 65% of the women interviewed were sexually abused or knew of someone who was.
It is estimated that the majority of the 52% of South Africans living in rural areas are women, who are the poorest of the poor. They are one of the specified target groups of the government’s recently announced integrated rural development strategy, aimed at redressing poverty and underdevelopment in several identified areas, or “nodal points”, like the central Karoo in the Western Cape. Early last year Fredericks completed a proposal to research sexual abuse and harassment on farms around Grabouw and to establish an advice office. She needs R300?000. She made contact with NGOs to gain support for the project. By last August the project was formally adopted by the Sexual Harassment Education Project (Shape), which has trained more than 20?000 people since 1994. Several doctors, lawyers and psychologists volunteered their support. Fredericks dropped off a copy of her project proposal with African National Congress MP Pregs Govender, chair of the parliamentary committee on the improvement of the quality of life and status of women. Fredericks says she is still waiting for a response to the dozens of messages left with Govender’s secretary. However, Govender says she never received the proposal; things may not be working as they should in Parliament. “When we hear from NGOs or civil society we follow it through,” she adds. The committee recently sponsored an International Women’s Day jazz concert in Cape Town. Another structure in the government’s gender machinery, the Office on the Status of Women, was established in 1997 to ensure government and its agencies have a common approach to “gender mainstreaming” the buzzword for correcting the bias towards men in government and service delivery. But President Thabo Mbeki, in his state of the nation speech in February, said the government “has failed to achieve the necessary progress on gender equity even in the area of employment”. The office last week finally released the National Policy Framework for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality. It was initially planned for 1998.
According to the policy, gender mainstreaming is vital to the transformation of South African society. To achieve this, the policy includes a gender management system and centralised information management system. Its guidelines state women should define and voice their needs which then should be included in policy formulation and resource allocations; that data should be “sex-disaggregated” to monitor the impact of policies on women and that policy wordings should be gender sensitive. When the Office on the Status of Woman was asked about funding possibilities for Fredericks’s proposal, it referred the matter to various ministries and departments.
The office does not give grants; it is “a facilitating body” within government to coordinate gender issues. It also looks at how government delivers to women and if it does not, why not. Yet several of the provincial branches of the office have project budgets, according to its information on the Internet. Says Fredericks: “They [women in government] can’t say anything about rural women. Never did they come to visit. If they want to talk about women’s rights, surely they must come out to see for themselves.”