VIOLENCE AGAINST OUR ELDERLY
“We need to plan together, implement together, and account together. We owe this to the women and children of South Africa. We owe it to all who have been victims of this scourge, including families and loved ones. We owe it to the people of this country.” What we have stressed throughout this process is the importance of a collaborative and coordinated approach toward combating gender-based violence and femicide. One of the great successes of our effort to fight gender-based violence is the extent to which social partners have rallied around the National Strategic Plan. The presence here today of such a broad range of civil society organisations, public bodies, and social formations is a testament to this. We are grateful to all those people from across society who have been "The actions we take now will determine whether this crime forever remains a feature of our national life, or whether we can say we are the generation that ended it."
We have in recent times seen a spate of rapes and killings of elderly women, our mothers, and grandmothers that are meant to be respected and treated with dignity. These horrors defy comprehension. There are really no words for them. They tell a story about our society that is deeply disturbing. It is a story of a nation at war with itself. These barbaric acts are a shameful indictment of the men of this country. It is not women who are responsible for ending such crimes; it is men.
As a society, ending violence against women and children cannot be anything but our foremost priority.
This is about the lives of our country’s women and children. There can be no greater urgency. That is why all of us who are attending this Summit must be focused on action and results. We need to be critical about those areas of the National Strategic Plan in which there has been little or no progress. We need practical plans to correct shortcomings and weaknesses.
ACTION AND ACCOUNTABILITY
involved throughout all stages of the formulation of the NSP and guided its
This Summit must look at what is working, what is not, and what is needed to make a difference. This is an accountability Summit. This second Presidential Summit is for us to assess progress in fulfilling the commitments we made at the first Summit in 2018 and in implementing the National Strategic Plan.
implementation. We are further grateful to all the Working Groups, co-chaired by government and civil society representatives, that have been working tirelessly to drive the implementation of the NSP.
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Dec 2022| Collective Action Magazine
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