Public Sector Leaders | February 2021

Page 56

GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE THE

SILENT

PANDEMIC

by Mbuyiselo Botha Commissioner at Commission for Gender Equality (CGE)

T

he world has been hit by an unprecedented, brutal and tragic pandemic, which has left bare the world’s insufficiencies when it comes to dealing with inequality. In South Africa, the impact has been especially severe, considering the already stark reality of inequality we are still battling – long into our democracy. But it is the gendered aspect of COVID-19 which I would like to focus on here. Due to the way our society is structured, this pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on women. Traditionally, it is women who carry water to homes in areas that do not have access to running water, it is women who look after the sick, while also ensuring that there is food on the table. Women do not only represent the majority of workers in the health sector in the world, but they are said to do three times as much unpaid care work at home as men, according to UN Women.

In addition, women are at the receiving end of increased abuse, due to the pandemic confining them at home, with their abusers, for longer periods of time than usual. With law enforcement increasingly focusing and diverting more of its attention toward ensuring that South Africans abide by the stringent measures placed on our society during this period – especially during the earlier, stricter lockdown levels – the question is: What effect will this have on women and gender-based violence?

A crisis such as this puts strain on the many citizens who are already on the periphery of society. And indeed, this pandemic has shown to have a material effect on women, who have experienced an increased rate of abuse as a result. During lockdown Level 5, the

56 | Public Sector Leaders • February 2021

national Gender-Based Violence Command Centre is said to have received triple the number of calls from women who were trapped with their abusive partners at home. This is echoed by one of the findings of the 2020 multicountry study on the ‘Emerging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender-based violence in Africa’ conducted by MenEngage and Sonke Gender Justice.The study found that “before COVID-19, for majority of the respondents the frequency of violence incidents was either indicated as ‘once’ or ‘a few times’ with 67%, 80%, 62% and 18% of responding females from Cameroon, DRC, Kenya and South Africa respectively indicating that the frequency was ‘a few times’. The majority of the females in all countries indicated that abuse happened ‘many times’ after the pandemic begun. Additionally, the difference in severity of abuse between the period before and during COVID-19 was noticeable


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