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It’s an anti gender-based violence summit meant for politicians and middle-class women that won’t serve the interest of the working class and poor.
This is why the Gauteng community healthcare forum, a group claiming to be at the forefront of tackling gender-based violence in townships, says it is planning the boycott the planned national gender-based violence and femicide summit scheduled to be held at Saint George Hotel and conference centre in Centurion on Thursday and Friday.
The summit was announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa at the national Women’s Day celebrations in August.
During his Women’s Day celebrations speech in August, Ramaphosa said government had agreed with the demands of women who marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria earlier that month. The marchers had submitted a memorandum to him. In it, they called for the summit where a roadmap to end the scourge of gender-based violence would be developed.
The forum, which claims to represent community health workers from clinics around Gauteng, said it would boycott the summit because it would not be pro-working class.
The presidency had not responded to questions at the time of writing.
Doreen Mongale, the forum’s deputy chairperson, said theirs was a call to build a militant feminist movements from below.
Despite that their members carry the burden of entering townships highly filled with violence against women and children, Mongale said they were not involved in the planning of the summit.
“As we move from one house to another we are not only faced with the violence but we are the people who carry the burden to make sure women and children who are victims of such crimes get the necessary support. The gender summit is not pro-working class women as it claims to be. We can see this in its list of demands, in its organising strategies and in the way it is tackling the violence we are faced with. It remains a process of middle-class women and politicians that use working-class women as token for their own interests.”
Mongale said they are wary of government-aligned initiatives in the quest to fight gender-based violence and “cannot support a presidency that holds summits that continue to exclude the poor majority”.
She said their members had also been victims of gender-based violence in communities.
“Many of us have been raped, beaten and sexually harassed in the line of duty and fear for our lives. We still remain unrecognised by the government. The government continues to fail to address issues around gender-based violence because it excludes working class women that are at the receiving end of the high levels of gender-based violence in South Africa.
We are also concerned that our participation might be simply a way to swell numbers, and give the appearance of inclusivity when agreements being presented to the Summit have already been fixed by middle-class women organisations and the government,” Mongale said.
She said a vague and hollow declaration in support of the fight against gender-based violence would be signed at the summit so that government and parties involved can pretend that it was supported by all sections of society.
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