Gender Justice Barometer Issue 22

What kind of nation will we have in the future for a country already notorius for high levels of violence and the highest rape statistics in the world? Many response mechanisms have been suggested as a way of dealing with school violence such as increasing security and so forth but much more needs to be done to influence behaviour change.

Read related article
Read related article

Human rights organisations say hundreds of people have fled rural areas where the army, police and war veterans have spearheaded terror campaigns against civilians for daring to vote against ZANU-PF, the party of President Robert Mugabe, in the 29 March poll.

A 70-year-old grandmother from Murehwa district in Mashonaland East said she had run after ZANU-PF supporters and traditional leaders threatened her. “My grandchildren are MDC supporters. In the run up to the elections, they were campaigning for the opposition and would wear party regalia. I am now being accused of encouraging my grandchildren to campaign for the MDC.” Read full article

Further, in taking its rightful statutory role, the CGE undertook to spare no effort in ensuring passing of appropriate legislation and policies to transform the landscape of gender rights in general, and gender-based violence in particular, and to work more closely with civil society the agents of change. While calling on widespread changes, the CGE also called on citizens of South Africa to hold the CGE accountable to its mandate.

* The abuse of culture and religion in shaping of attitudes prevailing in gender-based violence
* Lack of political drive behind the fight against gender-based violence
* Men’s socio-psychological grounding/environment as abusers and contributing factors to their vulnerability, as well as their role as partners in combating gender-based violence
* Research, monitoring and evaluation processes and challenges faced by the gender sector
* While noting the valuable ones, the conference identified flaws in legislation and policies that create blockages in the administration of justice pertaining to gender-based violence offences, as well as programmes, services and support for victims of such offences.

Efforts to meet international development goals must focus on empowering women, Deputy UN Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro said in a speech delivered at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

“Empowering women is not just an end in itself; it is a prerequisite for reaching all of the Millennium Development Goals ­ our common vision to build a better world in the 21st century,” she said of the targets, known as MDGs, that aim to slash a host of global ills by 2015.

At the moment, the news is quite sobering, she said: systematic discrimination against girls and women in the world’s poorest countries will make it impossible for these states to meet the priority goal to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by that year. Read full article.
Source: Catholic Information Service for Africa

Please add your comments by going to  our bulletin board. These comments will be fed into national consultation processes; the gender ministers meeting taking place in Windhoek in late April; the Heads of State summit on Poverty in Mauritius in April, and all other forums leading up to the HOS in August. Make your voice heard! Be part of the change we all seek!   

The comes on the back drop of national  consultations by National Gender Machineries, NGOs and relevant stakeholders aimed at lobbying for the adoption of the draft SADC Gender and Development Protocol by Heads of State in August this year.

Countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa have held consultation meetings between government and civil society.  In other countries meetings have been scheduled for future dates.

The draft Protocol was discussed at the April SADC Summit on Poverty held in Mauritius. There is a lot of ground work and enthusiasm in the region to push ahead and ensure that the draft Protocol is adopted at the August gathering.
View Alliance press release on post election violence in Zimbabwe
View latest draft of the draft SADC Gender and Development Protocol

Women Members of Parliament (MP’s) have backed calls to make defilement a non-bailable offence as one way to deter perpetrators from committing such a crime.

Zambia Women Parliamentary Caucus chairperson, Regina Musokotwane welcomed the calls from some sections of society who wanted defilement and rape cases to be a non-bailable offence.

"Personally, I will support the call to make the offence of child abuse non-bailable and as women MPs, we are calling for stiffer punishment on perpetrators," she said.

Sexual violence against women is rampant in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) but the majority of perpetrators, especially in "no-law" zones, go unpunished, according to a UN independent human rights expert.

In South Kivu Province, for example, 14,200 rape cases were registered between 2005 and 2007 but only 287 were taken to court, Titinga Frederic Pacere, the UN Human Rights Council’s independent expert on the state of human rights in the DRC, told reporters on 14 March.

He expressed concern over the human rights situation in the DRC, saying insecurity was almost everywhere, especially in the east, and state authority had not reached all areas.

According to analysts, sexual violence against women and girls is a facet of warfare that is often used as a weapon of terror to inflict physical and psychological damage. But in DRC, it is "systematic" and could be prosecuted as a crime against humanity or as a form of genocide. Read full article.

The study by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is the first of its kind conducted in a country where anecdotal evidence suggests an alarming number of female children are victims of abuse. More disconcertingly still, the mushrooming population of orphans and vulnerable children in Swaziland provide yet more opportunities for sexual exploitation to occur.

In two years, 200,000 Swazi children will have been orphaned by AIDS – more than one-fifth of the current population, according to UNICEF. With HIV prevalence at 33.4 percent among people aged between 15 and 49, the country has the world’s highest infection rate. As a result, life expectancy has halved from nearly 60 years in the 1990s to just over 30 years today. Read full article
Source: IRIN News

PREVENTION, PUBLIC EDUCATION & AWARENESS RAISING

Just weeks after a woman was assaulted at the Noord Street rank for exercising her right to wear clothing of her own choice-a mini-skirt in this instance-a group of taxi drivers at the Noord Street rank have violently assaulted a woman passenger. In this instance, a woman passenger paid with a R100 note for a R3.50 fare and then complained when she was given her change entirely in small coins. For this act of “insubordination” she was dragged out of the taxi and slapped as the taxi drivers yelled “women talk too much these days”.

These two incidents of violence represent an alarming pattern of violence perpetrated by men who appear to feel threatened by gender transformation and are using violence to protect the privileges many men have long regarded as their birthright. Tragically, these men seem to equate being a man with dominance over women, aggression and a willingness to use violence to demonstrate their power and control over women. Read ful article
Source: Womensnet

Lesotho government, civil society organisations and other stakeholders will join hands in developing a year long National Action Plan to End Gender Violence. A workshop will be held in collaboration with Gender Links from 5 – 7 May 2008 in Maseru.

Governments in Mauritius, South Africa, Swaziland and Tanzania have finalised and launched the plans. Implementation is in progress.  In some instances consultations are being finalised before adoption while in others the implementation processes need to be strengthened.
 
Increasingly it is becoming clear to all that greater focus needs to placed on primary prevention interventions if gender violence is going to be achieved decisively.

The draft SADC Gender and Development Protocol sets a target of halving current levels of gender violence by 2015. However do we know the current levels of gender violence?

Developing strong monitoring and evaluation mechanisms for measuring progress in ending gender violence should be key in these national action plans.
Click here to view 365 days Action Plans developed by countries

OPINION AND ANALYSIS

Call it by any name – kuchaya mapoto (SHona), kuishi pamoja bila ndoa (Kiswahili) , masihlalisane (Zulu), manyengwe (Lozi) – living together, or cohabitation, is a reality in Southern Africa. Yet despite the many reasons for couples opting out of tying the official knot, many people in these relationships find that legal rights protecting them are far less than for their married counterparts.