The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), known primarily for its vigorous advocacy for the provision of free antiretroviral drugs, has embarked on a new tack to curb the spread of HIV.
It launched its End Violence Against Women campaign at the same time as the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, but plans to campaign on this issue 365 days a year.
“The 16 Days of Activism is a gala event that is not reaching grassroots level,” says the TAC’s Nomfundo Eland. “We want it to be an activism movement that people on the ground benefit from.”
The logic behind tackling violence against women is that many women contract HIV through violent and non-consensual sex. According to the TAC, a supportive justice system will enable women to speak out freely against violence, safe in the knowledge that perpetrators will be brought to book.
The TAC’s campaign will focus on garnering community support for rape survivors such as marching to courts and encouraging witnesses to come forward, and increasing the number of members in the local TAC branches who are trained to handle violence against women.
The TAC says it is currently collecting data from the justice system’s dissatisfied customers. “We will be holding public izimbizo with police, magistrates and civil society so as to open the platform about problems experienced,” says Eland.
“There we want to say, “These are the cases that are still pending that need attention, what are you doing about them?” She says there has been an increase in cases where rape victims had revealed their status to their perpetrators and were murdered.
One such case was Lorna Mlofana, a member of one of the TAC’s Khayelitsha branches, who was killed in December 2003. “We followed her case and asked her community to assist with evidence,” explains Eland of some of the interventions advocated by the campaign.
“We picketed outside the Khayelitsha Magistrate’s Court and, after two years, the perpetrators were convicted.” She says this was proof of how cases could be attended to if the justice system was dealt a little confrontational embarrassment.
The campaign will take on different forms in the provinces, depending on what the immediate needs are in those regions. In Mpumalanga, for example, the focus will be on access to health services such as post-exposure prophylaxis for rape survivors and regular pap smears for HIV-positive women above the age of 30.
In Gauteng, the focus will be on finding ways to deal with sexual harassment, while in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape it will be access to justice. In the Eastern Cape, the crusade will tackle gender-based violence and issues of access to health.
Eland says the aim is not just to picket but to work together with the justice system. “We have already started visiting police stations and talking to them about the challenges faced by women from the minute they enter that environment,” says Mafu.
“[In certain stations] we have put in observers to look at how police process charges and have picked volunteers to support people laying those charges. We have also made the community aware that they can report police officers for an unsupportive attitude.
“We have made a call to action to the government to train magistrates because it is shocking how they allow defence lawyers to ask questions about the sexual history of the survivors and have called for an ombudsman to be present in courts.”
Mafu is vague, however, on how the TAC will ensure that magistrates are trained, but says it “will make sure that it happens”. Much of the TAC’s strategy still involves marching as a means of lobbying for legal reform.
It plans to march to the Union Buildings with affidavits about cases that did not reach the prosecution stage, so that “the deputy president can recognise the plight of women”.
Its plans to fast-track the signing of the Sexual Offences Bill are equally vague: “We will be meeting with Tshwaranang and other women’s organisations like Women on Farms and Rape Crisis to come up with a plan of action. We will have that done by next week.”
It is clear that this campaign is designed to jolt the justice and health system into action. “While we are working on a relationship with the government, we as the TAC will continue to amplify the voice of the people in the community if they feel they are getting inadequate service,” says Mafu. ” We will never stop being confrontational.”