SOUTH Africa has classified violence against women a national disaster following an online campaign culminating in countrywide protests on Friday.
Women were urged to “withdraw from the economy for one day”, and lie down for 15 minutes at 12:00 local time (10:00 GMT) in honour of the 15 females who are murdered in the country every day.
The state had refused to make the categorisation but changed tack after “evaluating the persistent and immediate life-safety risks posed by ongoing acts of violence”.
South Africa experiences some of the world’s highest levels of gender-based violence (GBV), with the rate at which women are killed five times higher than the global average, according to UN Women.
The National Disaster Management Centre (NDMC) has classified GBV and femicide a disaster following “a thorough reassessment of previous reports and updated submissions from organs of state as well as civil organisations”, said Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa.
The NDMC had earlier said calls to make the categorisation did not meet legal requirements.
Warning: This report contains descriptions of sexual assault
Fridays “lie downs” happened in 15 locations across South Africa, including major cities such as Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg.
Allies in Eswatini, Kenya and Namibia have also expressed their support for the protest and say they joined in.
The demonstrators wore black as a sign of “mourning and resistance”.
The protest, dubbed the G20 Women’s Shutdown, has been organised by Women for Change, which has also been spearheading the online campaign that has seen many people, including celebrities, change their social media profile pictures to purple – a colour often linked to GBV awareness.
There has also been an online petition, signed by over one million people.
On Thursday, President Cyril Ramaphosa told the G20 Social Summit that South Africa had “declared gender-based violence and femicide a national crisis” in 2019.
Shortly afterwards, Mr Hlabisa confirmed it had been upgraded to a national disaster and that an announcement would be made on Friday, according to Women for Change.
The organisation shared a statement on its Instagram page on Thursday welcoming the news and telling its followers “we have won” and that their “persistence has been recognised”.
“We have written history together [and] we have finally forced the country to confront the truth,” it said.
The categorisation allows government departments to use their allocated budgets to “implement every measure possible” to reduce the scourge, the cooperative governance ministry told the BBC.
If these measures fail to bring change, the government can then declare a national state of disaster which would allow for the issue to be treated with even more urgency.
Before the announcement, Women for Change spokesperson Cameron Kasambala told the BBC that “so many beautiful acts and legislations” had been followed by “lack of implementation and transparency” on the government’s part.
“We’ve integrated violence… into our culture [and] into our social norms,” she said.
“Once the government truly reacts to this issue, I feel like we’ll already be able to see a reaction on the ground. Because they set the precedent and the tone for how the country responds.”
