VIOLENCE MUST BE THING OF THE PAST

Sir,

No one has the right to kill; killing can never be justified. The problem is that what people may think is moral is not always legal, and what is legal is generally what the majority of the population thinks is moral, and as such morality and the law developed hand in hand for as long as people had laws and morals. Hardly a day after reports of a woman being killed another story broke out that a man stabbed his girlfriend. The bone of contention being that she no longer wanted to live with him. Could rejection really drive someone to such an extent?

How many other women are unknowingly in relationships with men who could turn around and stab them the moment they change their minds about the relationship status? But when we start justifying murder, where are we going as a nation? Who are we to justify it? Where do we draw the line? Can peace ever be attained through violent means? If everyone who is angry or stressed went on a killing spree, what kind of country would this be? As a woman I have interacted with men who had the potential to kill. You see them when they court a woman, they will continue even when they see the odds are against them, when she says ‘no’ they will be persistent and start calling her names and being violent toward her if she rejects them. They do not want to accept rejection from women but want women to accept that they do as they please.

Killing

Men are jailed for killing women, while on the other hand women who kill their partners are still treated differently from men. Infidelity is regularly used as a defence in such cases, often successfully, by men who kill, and yet women are given no understanding of or sympathy for their experience of horrendous domestic and sexual violence. I remember a case from Mpolonjeni where a woman and her step-children killed her husband after years of endless abuse, and when she turned and killed him, only then did the police come out and say she had been reporting abuse for years. Had her plight been given attention, the murder could have been avoided. But why do we wait until someone dies before abuse is taken seriously in the country?

The victims of domestic violence, who live in well-founded fear for their lives, have the right to protection in order to avoid such circumstance as murder. Tragedies could have been avoided had the perpetrators of these crimes been dealt with in the first instance. For the sake of all the women and men who have lost their lives in the hands of the people they trusted the most, let us demand that domestic violence becomes a thing of the past!

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