Port Elizabeth Mental Health, in partnership with Bayworld, hosted a seminar on femicide on Friday to raise awareness about women abused by their partners and gender-based violence in Nelson Mandela Bay.
The seminar was aimed at helping communities to understand the phenomenon, particularly among women in the disadvantaged areas of the Bay.
Attending the seminar were members of the community at large, the corporate sector, the departments of justice and health, and the Reeva Steenkamp Foundation.
Mayor Athol Trollip said SA was one of the countries with the highest incidence of women abuse.
“We celebrated Mandela Day on Wednesday and he has been iconic in representing humanity, yet his own country has the highest rate of abuse – we have let him down.”
Trollip said Mandela had led by example and men needed to be exemplary in the community to stop women abuse.
The femicide seminar also highlighted the hardship families of victims undergo. Ncediwa Ngxishe, 49, told how her sister’s death had devastated the family.
The 33-year-old mother of two children aged six and 14, who cannot be named to protect them, was shot at her house in Motherwell while she was with her 14-year-old in October 2017.
“The death of my sister was so painful and we are still struggling to get closure because her killers were never arrested and we have no hope that the police will ever find them.
“As the family, we will forever wonder what happened to my sister. I wish it never happens to any other woman, it is so painful,” Ngxishe said.
June Steenkamp, founder of the Reeva Steenkamp Foundation and mother of Reeva, who was shot dead by Paralympian Oscar Pistorius on Valentine’s Day five years ago, echoed her sentiments.
She said every February 14, when love is celebrated, meant pain and suffering for her family as they still mourned.
Steenkamp said she had established the foundation to raise awareness of women abuse and to help those who underwent the same suffering.
“For the past five years I’ve been travelling around introducing my book to the world and trying to save a mother from death.
No mother deserves what happened to me with my daughter,” she said.
Nelson Mandela University psychology department lecturer and an expert on trauma in the Eastern Cape, Kempie van Rooyen, said the high rate of women abuse may have been caused by the hierarchy of norms that society had set.
SA had also adopted the strategy of using violence to solve problems, he said.