START TO GENDER ABUSE CAMPAIGN

Swaziland’s Sixteen Days of Activism on Gender Violence campaign got off to a good start in the Times Sunday.

The United Nations campaign which runs from 25 November (International Women’s Day) to 10 December (Human Rights Day) is designed to raise awareness about the problem and impact of violence on women and children.

To mark the start of the campaign the Times Sunday (25 November 2007) ran two pages of articles about a four-year-old girl who was repeatedly raped.

The Times Sunday reported that the man who is said to have raped the child was caught but community members let him go free with a warning. He later raped an eight-year-old and a four-year-old. It transpired that members of the community knew the man had a record of raping children.

The man has now been arrested and faces two charges of rape and indecent assault.

This was an important story and it was right for the Times Sunday to publish it even though the subject matter is distressing. It is important that the public knows that these things are going on. It is also important to know that many members of the community don’t believe the crime of child rape to be important enough to turn the alleged rapist over to the police.

The Times Sunday reported that the Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse (SWAGAA) had registered its surprised that people could keep quiet about such an incident.

As part of its coverage of the Sixteen Days of Activism on Gender Violence the Times Sunday also gave information to help parents who might find that their child has been the victim of child sexual abuse.

Also included were statistics about how much violence against women and children take place in Swaziland.

According to its own figures, women were the highest number of SWAGAA clients in the past year with 1,453 of them attended for counselling services. There were 547 males who were counselled and only 427 children.

A total of 242 women were subjected to physical abuse. High numbers on sexual abuse were on the girl child with 172 cases reported while boy children sodomised were 11.

SWAGAA records that lovers are the most perpetrators of violence with 34 per cent of reported cases.

The reports in the Times Sunday also included personal testimony from a gender activist who was herself sexually molested by a male nurse while in labour pains at a hospital. She said, ‘I am a gender activist, I’m an anti abuse advocate, I’m everything that represents an “empowered woman”. I kept wondering to myself, what could have gone wrong, what made me keep silent about this terrible experience that still makes me disgusted even 15 months down the line.’

Interestingly, she said that she was afraid to tell anyone about the assault in case the newspapers got hold of the story. She said this about the fear of the media. ‘I can remember imagining the news headlines “ABC employee raped” “Gender activist sexually assaulted during labour” “Activist claims to be raped”

She may have had some justification for her fears. The headline that the Times Sunday gave to her story was sensational. ‘Gender Activist Breaks her silence: I was sexually molested’