SODV BILL – LET THE WORK BEGIN

Hey girls, I hope you’re all flourishing and thriving this week. Last week I was on the tail end of a bad flu and it came back worse than before this week.

So I have been trying to keep a lower profile than usual but not so low that I don’t read the papers to keep up with all of you.
When I saw that His Majesty had given his assent to the Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Bill, I was over the moon.

It is a strange experience to finally feel seen and cared for in a country you call home. It took 10 years for this Bill to reach this stage.
Stakeholders and legislators could not quite agree on what constituted as harassment or why stalking should be illegal in the context of this Bill. But finally there is a legal instrument in this kingdom that will ensure that those who violate my rights as provided for by this new law will face the full brunt of the law.

Being a girl in Swaziland means you grow up being socialised to allow men to make inappropriate comments to you, to smile at men even when you’d rather not because that is safer than being adversarial, to interpret their aggression as a form of affection, their ceaseless often illogical pursuit of you as a testament to the weight of their feelings.

By the time you are a woman in this country you know to say no to men but be simultaneously wholly cognisant of the fact that often that will not be enough.

That a man will do as he pleases in engaging with you and there is little you can do about it – by way of legal recourse or society’s machinations.
You become accustomed to feeling less than, to feeling as though life will happen to you, you get used to pushing back all of the time and it is thoroughly exhausting. I’ll tell you that for free. By the time I turned 24, I was acutely aware of the weight of being born a woman in this country.

I want to say a huge thank you to those who lobbied ceaselessly for this to eventually be passed and enacted into law.
Your efforts, as we can all appreciate today, were not in vain. The work does not stop here. There is work to be done in sensitising communities, sensitising the police – imagine reporting that someone is stalking you to an officer who courts women in that manner?

We hear stories every day about men we never thought were possible of violence having committed violent acts. Men, who will move through the world with a keen understanding of this law, possibly more than some of us women, yet still commit heinous crimes against us.

These are the things we are up against. We are also going to have to work towards deconstructing the idea that violence is love.
An idea so many of us grow up believing that by the time we enter romantic relationships that forms a part of our identity. I’ll never forget in university a peer looking me dead in the eye and saying ‘if he doesn’t beat me I don’t believe that he loves me’. My blood ran cold.

Although I disagreed with her I couldn’t judge her because we are all a product of our respective environments and someone teaches you to interpret violence in that way.
I have no interest in living that kind of life.

I have no interest in continuing to be harassed my every waking moment by men who do not deserve my attention.
I am tired of always having to defer to the men in the room when I am far more intelligent regarding the topic being discussed.
I am bored entirely by men happily going through the world with very little consequences for anything they do yet I must not only birth them with a womb that betrays me every month with senseless pain but I must also inherit a man who cannot cook and clean from their mothers who coddle them.

I’m not showing up to whatever party you have going on for men who force themselves onto women and then try to rationalise that by what she was wearing, what she was drinking – everything but the fact that she said no. No ways.
There is a lot of community outreach work that still lies ahead.

A lot of conversations to help reframe this new reality and these new rights women of Eswatini now get to enjoy.
It is not a small task, it will likely continue being fought for by our children and their children but us starting the work today and right here will ensure that sometime in the future girls and women get to live in a country where a ‘no’ coming from their mouths is as respected as the ‘yes’ that is presumed will eventually come. 

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