Ramaphosa's 60-day GBVF plan dismissed as a repeat by the NGO that answers the calls
The Tears Foundation says the four measures announced in the national address restate plans that have been on paper for seven years, and that victims still cannot open a case.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced four immediate measures on gender-based violence and femicide, with deadlines running from 60 to 90 days, and the organisation that sits with the victims of that violence has said the announcement repeats what has been on paper for seven years.
As eNCA reported on 29 September, the measures are a national case recovery operation into unresolved GBVF cases involving women and children, action on the forensic backlog, safety audits for women, and intensified enforcement of existing liquor laws and by-laws.
Celest Louw of the Tears Foundation said the speech was a repeat of plans that have been in place for seven years without being addressed. She said government is divorced from what is happening on the ground, and that the list of names the country talks about is nowhere near the list of people dying every day.
Her sharpest point was about time. People need help right now, she said, and she cannot see anything changing while the timeframes run this long.
That is the substance of the criticism, and it is not a claim about the country. It is a claim about a government plan and the pace of it, made by an organisation that answers the calls. The Enquirer has put the criticism to the Presidency and to the Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities. Their answer is carried in full below.
[GOVERNMENT RESPONSE PLACEHOLDER]
What the four measures mean in practice is easier to see when you know which institution carries each one. The case recovery operation means reopening unresolved dockets, which is work for the South African Police Service and the National Prosecuting Authority. The forensic backlog sits with the police’s forensic services and the national health laboratory system. Safety audits are a municipal and provincial function, run street by street and campus by campus. Liquor enforcement belongs to the police and to metro police, working from by-laws that many municipalities already have on their books.
None of that is new machinery. It is the same machinery the country has been trying to move for years, which is why the deadline is the part being watched.
Louw raised two further problems that are not in the four measures. NGOs working with victims face a funding problem, and she said nothing in the announcement addresses it in the same breath. Victims also still deal with officials who refuse to help them open a case. That second point is the one an ordinary person meets first. A case that is never opened cannot be recovered by any operation, and a docket that does not exist cannot be cleared from a backlog.
The Tears Foundation is a national organisation that runs a 24-hour helpline and crisis centres for survivors of rape and abuse, and it works alongside the police and the courts on the cases it refers. When it says the list of names is short, it is speaking from the calls it receives.
Ramaphosa’s address is the fourth time in recent years that a national response to GBVF has been set out at the highest level, following the 2020 emergency plan and the National Strategic Plan that followed it. The measures announced this week are framed as immediate steps rather than a new strategy.
For a reader who wants to know what changes in the next two months, the honest answer is that the test is administrative. Dockets either get reopened or they do not. Forensic samples either move or they sit. A woman who walks into a police station either gets a case number or she is turned away. Those are the outcomes the 60-day deadline will be measured against, and they are outcomes a person can check for themselves.
What is not in dispute is the scale of what the measures are aimed at. GBVF is the subject of a national plan precisely because the caseload runs into the tens of thousands a year, and because the conviction rate has lagged the reporting rate for as long as the plan has existed.
The Enquirer will follow the 60-day mark and report what the police, the prosecuting authority and the municipalities can show for it, and we will put the same questions to the Presidency that we have put now.
Source: eNCA, “People need help right now” - NGOs unimpressed with Ramaphosa’s GBVF measures
