Inability to find cure for GBV due to wrong diagnosis

There is a need for a second opinion on the misdiagnosed social ill that is gender-based violence (GBV). Particularly intimate partner violence (IPV), which accounts for the overwhelming majority of GBV cases, or interchangeably GBVF as expanded. Our inability to find a cure to this intractable scourge may be down to government, society, and us individually, having got the pulse of the problem wrong.

First up, the government, which frankly is doing less than nothing to arrest this scourge. The government’s harebrained “National strategic plan (NSP) on gender-based violence & femicide 2020-2030″ does not seem to have any solutions. The plan on GBVF is fodder out of “new dawn” Ramaphoria from the first Presidential Summit on GBVF that took place in November 2018.

The permanent national council on GBVF, the custodian of the national plan and its implementation, is yet to be appointed, let alone parliament pass a Bill (introduced in November 2022) on its establishment. President Cyril Ramaphosa had hoped it was going to be constituted at the beginning of the 2020/2021 financial year. This year marks five years from its deadline, with this year also supposed to be its first five-yearly review.

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The NSP seems to, at the very least, acknowledge enablers, drivers and exacerbating factors of GBV but attributes the root to one sex. To find anything close to a solution in preventing and eliminating intimate partner violence, we must first strip the psychosexual monster of its genitalia. Notwithstanding disproportionality, and emotions, we must first accept that both men and women are perpetrating violence towards their intimate partners to the extent of murdering them.

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