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The creation of the proposed National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide is an important first step to addressing these social evils because it acknowledges the need for more than policing.

It will be the role of the National Council to set norms and standards for government projects. This would not, in itself, eliminate GBVF. But it would contribute to creating an environment in which the reverberations of our violent past stop dictating our present and our future.

The level of GBVF in South Africa is a consequence of a toxic cocktail of inherited gender prejudices and inequalities, and deliberately broken social structures. Among our most broken institutions is a functional family unit.

According to research published by the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town in July 2023, “international studies have shown that the country is unique in the extent that parents are absent from children’s daily lives”.

The institute ascribes parental absence to a variety of factors including apartheid-era controls on population movement, migrant labour policies of the past, as well as poverty, housing and educational opportunities.

Just one in three South African children were living with both their parents in 2021, while one in five were living with neither of their parents.

We must also address the environmental contribution of high incidences of crime to urban dumping grounds created by the apartheid Group Areas Act. With their overloaded, broken and deliberately under-develop infrastructure, they destroy hopes and dreams, and are incubators for violence.

We welcome the recognition, in the Bill, that gender based violence takes a number of forms.

We’d like the proposed National Council to take practical steps to break down gender prejudice, by presenting norms and standards such as equal pay for equal work.

In order to see our way forward, however, we must deal with the past. If the Council doesn’t prioritise redress for prevalent and persistent socio-economic conditions created by apartheid it will reveal itself to be nothing more than expensive PR.

Issued by GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Parliament, Brett Herron