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Checklist for change
Coleen Lowe Morna
November 25, 2005 - (Mail & Guradian Online) 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
From: http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=257677&area=/insight/monitor/
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