UNION BUILDINGS 10 DECEMBER 1999
Today we have come together at this National Accountability Forum to review the progress we have made in meeting our commitments in terms of the SADC Addendum on the Prevention and Eradication of Violence Against Women.
Last year, government departments and civil society organisations met at a conference in November to make commitments to and adopt a National Programme of Action (NPA) to implement the SADC Addendum. This collective pledge to the NPA united us with our sis ters and brothers in other parts of the world who have taken a stand on this issue and have vowed to eradicate the scourge of violence against women.
The international community has increasingly recognised the need to specifically identify and address the issue of women's rights since the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which celebrated its 50th anniversary on this day last year.
Women's rights once again became the focus of international attention in 1979 with the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (the so-called CEDAW Convention). It is a matter of considerable regional prid e that all the SADC member states have signed or acceded to this Convention or are in the final stages of doing so.
South Africa hosted the SADC Regional Conference on No Violence Against Women in Durban during March, last year. This Conference was attended by virtually all Ministers of Justice from the 14 SADC countries and was also attended by Ministers responsible fo r Women's Affairs and state institutions responsible for promoting gender equality in the various member states.
It was at this conference that the SADC Declaration on the Prevention and Elimination of Violence Against Women was formulated. That declaration was formally adopted in Mauritius in September 1998 as an addendum to the 1997 SADC Declaration on Gender and D evelopment. This Declaration now constitutes a binding regional instrument, which commits us collectively to the objects and aims of that document.
In November 1998, under the leadership of the Department of Justice and the Office on the Status of Women, South Africa convened a National Conference of Commitments to draw up an integrated programme for the implementation of the SADC Addendum. All of Sou th Africa's government departments signed up and agreed to mutually supportive strategies aimed at meeting the challenge of eradicating violence against women and the girl child. This collective commitment by the administrative institutions of state was un ique in that it represented a systematic and unified national response to the SADC Addendum.
The National Conference of Commitments was, not co-incidentally, convened on the first day of the 16 Days of Activism Campaign on No Violence Against Women and culminated on the 10th of December, last year.
The 16 Days of Activism Campaign has become an internationally recognised institution and we have once again joined the international community by participating in this all-important Campaign this year. It is then thoroughly appropriate that we have gather ed together on International Human Rights Days to assess our progress, take stock of any shortcomings and exchange ideas about the way forward.
The 16 Days of Activism Campaign serves to popularise the SADC instrument on Violence Against Women and Children. Participation in this campaign by government and civil society also conscientises communities and institutions about the need to unite against the awful spectre of violence that threatens to shatter the lives of too many women and children in our society. It also focuses the attention of all role players on the challenges that face us in our fight to establish women's rights as human rights and gain recognition for the indivisibility of these rights within the local and international arena.
The purpose of today's meeting is:
When we launched this programme 16 days ago, we identified five focus categories that will play an integral role in breaking the cycle of violence against women:
The Office on the Status of Women (OSW) further identified six departments to co-ordinate and lead the activities planned around these focus areas. These were the Departments of:
To ensure the involvement of the entire Executive, all departments have been assigned to one or other of the focus areas. Furthermore, Provincial OSWs were tasked with replicating this process at the provincial level and gaining the active participation of all the relevant role-players in the various regions.
Today, you will hear sectoral reviews from the three clusters that broadly cover the activities of the departments within government: the economic sector, the social sector and the justice and security sector.
These inputs will review the efforts of government to give effect to the promotion and protection of women's rights both within the institutions of state and within the communities that we are tasked to serve.
The Office on the Status of Women has guided the various departments to formulate integrated plans and strategies aimed at the eradication of violence against women. Sectoral perspectives have provided for a more textured and nuanced approach to developing integrated strategies that deal with the complex nature of violence, especially as it relates to women in our society.
The OSW has also approached this specific Annual 16-Day Campaign in a more integrated and holistic fashion. While we all recognise the importance of the 16-Day Programme, our efforts to eradicate violence against women should be an ongoing and continuous p rocess.
The OSW has thus decided to springboard, from the annual 16-day campaign, an integrated and all-inclusive programme that filters through each subsequent year in a sustained schedule of activities and events. Each annual programme will build on the achievem ents of the previous year, weaving the underlying themes and principles into a 5-Year Plan of Action, the draft of which will be presented to you later today by Dr Ellen Kornegay from the Office on the Status of Women.
It would be remiss of me to stand on this platform today without recognising the suffering of thousands of women who are the victims and survivors of violent abuse, including rape and murder. Their stories scream at us daily from newspapers and television screens in an orgy of blood and gore that is becoming too painful and tragic to assimilate.
And whenever I see these stories, I wonder about the thousands of faceless women whom we never hear about and who are too terrified to ask for help, too demoralised to find alternatives and simply too tired to resist.
There is a growing consensus that gender-based violence, particularly rape, is - more often than not - perpetrated by someone known to the victim. From a gender perspective, it is therefore important to engage both women and men to address the causes of ge nder-based violence, design strategies to counteract the causes, and to support the implementation of programmes that are aimed at eliminating all forms of gender-based violence. This has been one of the underlying themes of this year's campaign. It is the refor also important for me to recognise the increasing number of men who have come forward and responded to their social, moral and constitutional obligation to stem the tide of violence that threatens to engulf us.
The horrific stories that confront us in the media are daily testimony to the fact that an act of violence is an act of power and that there is clearly a perceived and assumed inequity in the social and societal relationships that exist between women and men. And while this inequity continues to exist, it compromises the substance and nature of our precious democracy and compromises the integrity of our beloved Constitution.
While violent crime presents risks to all sectors of society, the position of women and children, the aged and frail, and persons living with disabilities, is compounded by their vulnerability.
It is for this reason that we conduct campaigns to highlight the plight of vulnerable groups that form an increasingly large portion of modern society's social matrix. Each day the wealth differential between the world's have's and have-not's increases. And as these patterns of resource distribution respond to increased technology enhancements, our continent, Africa, sees increasing proportions of the continental population succumb to poverty and social degradation. And it is women and children who constitu te the majority of these increasingly marginalised communities.
Gender-based violence is not always about having a black eye or a battered body. Violence is also about having your maintenance withheld and having to tell your children there's nothing to eat. Violence is about not having control over resources and not be ing able to make choices about where to work and where to live.
Gender-based violence is not only an infringement of the rights of individual women, its prevalence constitutes an attack upon the very fabric of our society. Its effect on communities was recently highlighted when the international community became the un willing witness to the horrors of strife-torn Eastern Europe and the Great Lakes regions of Central Africa. Sitting there, in the relative safety and comfort of our own homes, we watched, transfixed by technicolor television images of organised programmes of violence aimed at women and children; programmes of rape and mutilation and untold misery.
Women cannot function normally in societies where they bear the brunt of institutional and societal violence. They are unable to become active and equal participants in the development of their families, communities or their countries. In short, on a conti nent where 54% of the population consists of women, we can no longer afford to marginalise them by imposing artificial social and economic barriers that relegate them to the fringes of our society. To do this, is to deny Africa the chance of relevant and m eaningful development and to deny our children the promise of a fulfilled and fulfilling tomorrow.
The imperative for eradicating violence against women can no longer be ignored; it is a national and international priority. We have a collective responsibility, as government and civil society, to dedicate ourselves to permanent eradication of violence against women on our continent and the world over.
To-day's activities should serve to renew our commitment and strengthen our resolve - we have a long way to go!
I would like to close this intervention with a quote that I used at the launch of the 16 Days of Activism, just last month. The quotation comes from the Angolan Presentation to the SADC conference in Durban, last year.
"If freedom was a myth of the last century and equality is the myth of our century, then let us together, at the end of this century, fight, so that one day humanity can walk on both its gender legs not biological genders, but rather ethical and political genders - so that humanity can walk properly, balanced well on its two gender legs, free from the trauma of violence against women...."