On December 12 last year, two days after the end of the Sixteen Days of Activism campaign, an editorial in a weekly South African newspaper posed the question: “So the seventh 16 Days of Activism campaign has come and gone, and what has changed? Has violence against women and children in South Africa diminished? … Do we promptly revert to the degradation now that the pressure is off and the campaign has been mothballed for another year?”
These are critical questions not only for those working in the gender justice sector, but for every South African — women and men — as the answers to these questions affect all of us. Advocates of the campaign are often accused of being “sentimental”. It has been argued that the campaign does little more than create hype for Sixteen Days, after which people go back to their lives and forget about the purpose of the campaign.
But it is difficult to forget. How does one forget the horror of gender violence when daily news headlines tell the story of yet another woman who has been murdered by her partner, another who has been raped and killed, another whose beating by her husband has led to hospitalisation: a dislocated shoulder, broken ribs, damaged organs.
It is incumbent on those of us who advocate women’s rights to move from the sentiment each one of these cases invokes to targeted and focused plans for eradicating this scourge from our midst. As the late Dr Martin Luther King used to say: “Don’t get angry; get smart.”
This underpins our decision in 2005 to conduct an audit of all the action points made during the 2004 Sixteen Day cyber dialogues to determine what has happened, what has not, and what still needs to be done.
When we meet again for the Sixteen Day campaign in 2006, it will not be to pat ourselves on the back but to ask tough questions about whether we have delivered on our commitments.
For until we do, we as a nation will have failed to deliver on the most important commitment that our Constitution enjoins us to: a non-racial, non-sexist society in which all women and men, boys and girls, are able to realise their full human potential.
Colleen Lowe Morna is the executive director of Gender Links