Legal Aid for Victims of Domestic Violence in SA

“But a man cannot be raped!” yelled a young woman from Hillbrow during a recent workshop at the Hillbrow Community Outreach Foundation. The young man next to her vehemently disagreed, insisting that anyone could be raped. Both turned to the workshop facilitators for guidance, indignant and certain they were correct. This workshop, conducted by LvA on March 31 2014, is the first in a series of community based workshops designed to create awareness around sexual violence and introduce a new resource we have recently developed entitled “Managing Sexual Abuse in Schools: A Guide for Children, Families and Community Members”. The journey to this handbook and the accompanying community workshops has been a long one. In 2012, LvA found itself involved, within a short span of time, in 8 cases of sexual violence in schools. Each of these cases involved the rape of students by teachers and misconduct by police, prosecutors, and department of education officials in the way in which the cases were managed. Together with two of our partner organizations, LvA worked to push these cases through the Department of Education and the criminal justice system. As a result, one teacher has been dismissed and the other cases are still pending.  Appalled by the lack of teacher accountability within schools and the weak government response to so egregious an abuse of power, LvA decided to develop, in collaboration with our partner organizations, a handbook for students, their parents, communities and educators. The handbook focuses on how to identify incidents of sexual violence with a step-by-step guide on how to report these cases. It is illustrated to make it easy to read and is written to be accessible to anyone aged 9 or older. On April 11 2014, we are hosting a launch at the Women’s Jail at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg to introduce the handbook to like-minded organizations, state actors and educators.

We soon realized that the handbook alone is not sufficient to raise awarenss around issues of sexual violence in schools. We have therefore begun a series of workshops for students in schools and aftercare programs in order to equip them with the knowledge and skills needed to identify and report cases of sexual violence. We also plan to conduct workshops and distribute the handbook amongst community-based organizations, paralegals and police officers working on cases of this nature. We believe that awareness raising and information sharing are necessary steps in addressing sexual violence in schools and hopefully shifting attitutes within communities about the gravity of sexual violence. Our first workshop at the Community Outreach Foundation demonstrated the need for such workshops as well as the handbook. Through their comments we learned that the youth were accutely aware of the prevalence of sexual violence in their schools and communities and had been fed a lot of information regarding such violence. However, while some of their knowledge was accurate, much of it was steeped in stereotypes and misunderstandings around gender-based violence.

By the end of our workshop, all conceded that a man, like a waman, could be the victim of sexual violence and other similar misunderstands were resolved as we worked our way through common misconceptions. Our hope is that the knowledge shared will be passed on to others in the community and with time, the stigma attached to sexual violence will lessen and survivors of violence will be more inclined to come forward.

Links:

• Lawyers against Abuse website