On November 21, when hundreds of women lay motionless on the pavements in a national shutdown protest, they were not performing symbolism, they were embodying a brutal truth. SA loses an estimated 15 women a day to gender-based violence. The bodies on the ground represented those who never got up again.
When President Cyril Ramaphosa responded by declaring gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) a national disaster, many hailed it as a historic moment. But for young women in areas such as Peddie in the Ngqushwa municipality in the Eastern Cape, the question is more fundamental: What does this declaration change in the lived realities of rural women who remain the faces of poverty, unemployment and inequality? In rural areas, young women do not learn about violence from the news, they learn about it through daily survival.
My municipality is one example, that is specifically identified as one of the poorest in the district, with particularly high unemployment among women, households led by women and many young women dependent on social grants. For most girls in Mqwashini or KwaNdlambe, for instance, economic independence is not an aspiration, it is a distant fantasy. The reality is that socioeconomic exclusion fertilises the soil in which gender-based violence and femicide grows.
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When there is no economic opportunity, when women are unemployed, dependent on grants and marginalised, the conditions that foster gender-based violence intensify. Without safe transport, girls walk long distances to school.
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