ADVERTORIAL CSVR
Localising the national GBV laws through community SGBV prevention strategies The missing link to curbing SGBV in our lifetime
O Annah MoyoKupeta is the Executive Director at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR). Ms MoyoKupeta is a human rights with 16 years’ experience working in the legal, transitional justice, human rights and violence prevention fields with a specific focus on legal research, gender and gender mainstreaming, regional litigation, policymaking, policy and legislative review and analysis, and development of soft law instruments for various target audiences from policy, peer CSO groups and victim groups.
40 | Public Sector Leaders | April 2022
ur communities are the site of sexual and genderbased violence (SGBV) and femicide. When these cases occur, it is communities that reel from such incidents and victims and perpetrators are often members of the community, with ties and roots in the community. It is therefore important that national policies and GBV laws find expression in, and resonate with, community members in the form of locally-owned and informed GBV prevention strategies. The pervasiveness of SGBV, particularly sexual violence in South Africa is alarming. In the month of April alone, a number of young women and girls were raped in a number of communities. Many cases did not make headlines this month. All these cases have one thing in common: They have taken place in a community setting; the perpetrators are mostly known to community members and victims are children to families in the communities. The aftermath of the violence will continue to ring in the ears of community members long after the national spotlight has waned. Community-led and informed SGBV prevention strategies as community social contracts, and statements of commitment by and for community members, make sense as an effective strategy to address community-based SGBV cases that are on the rise. The challenge with national laws, as progressive and transformational as they are, is that at the most, they remain an abstract to a large section of communities particularly those most affected by SGBV and the womxn and girls who bear the brunt of GBV in their homes and
