The barbaric and horrific killings of a number of women recently have shocked and outraged the country and no doubt left their families and communities traumatised.
Fort Hare law student Nosicelo Mtebeni, who was murdered and dismembered in East London; the grade 1 pupil from Khensani Primary School in Soshanguve who was raped in the school's toilets; Palesa Maruping, who was found hanging from the ceiling of a house in Khuma Location in North West; and Pheliswa Sawutana, who was strangled to death in Kosovo informal settlement in Cape Town.
No woman or human being deserves such cruelty or to die like an animal; no parent should go through such pain. We hold our children close to our hearts and to be told your child has been murdered and dismembered must be the most painful experience a parent has to go through.
These horrific cases once more demonstrate the depravity of some of our men. These deaths are just a few cases among many crimes committed against women involving murder, rape, kidnapping and the disappearance of girls and women in a context of what seems to be an out-of-control state of gender-based violence.
We cannot allow violence against women and children to be considered as normal in our society.
Last month the minister of police, Bheki Cele, released the latest crime statistics, which show that SA has become a war zone and we are fast losing the war against crime and gender-based violence.
Criminals are taking over our communities. The stats reveal that contact crime has risen by 60.6%. Police registered 10,006 cases of rape between April and June 2021. This was an increase of 4,201 cases and 72.4% more than the same period in 2020.
Murders claimed 5,760 lives in SA between April and the end of June 2021. Of the rape cases, 487 were domestic violence-related, while 164 murders were linked to domestic violence. On top of all this, a report came out that 23,000 girls fell pregnant between April and June 2021 in Gauteng.
Something has gone wrong in our country. This is not normal; the women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1955 fighting for women's and girls' rights must be turning in their graves because this is not what they fought for. As a society we are failing the women and girls of this country.
What kind of men turn on the women and children in their communities? What kind of men rape both women and children at this alarming rate, not to mention the physical and emotional abuse that women endure and suffer day in and day out? Come on men of SA - we are better than this, we can do better than this.
What is even harder to understand is that every year we celebrate Women's Month, and the idea is to promote women's rights and shine a spotlight on gender-based violence. Yet, despite all these efforts, year in and year out we see an alarming increase in the murder, rape and abuse of women and children.
What kind of men turn on the women and children in their communities?
Something urgently needs to be done to deal with our troubled society, or our troubled society will deal with us. I totally agree with the statement issued by We Will Speak Out SA titled "Words Fail Us".
It says: "As long as women are the poorest, most marginalised members of our societies, and their bodies are degraded, beaten, raped and even cut into pieces, we have failed to respond to God's call to minister peace, love and justice. We need to continue to ask for forgiveness."
As a senior church leader myself, I take full responsibility that we have not responded to the urgency of this crisis we face as church leaders. It is for this reason that we have called upon President Cyril Ramaphosa to urgently gather the leaders of this country to respond to the many challenges we face, and at the top of the agenda must be this terrible violence against women and children.
I believe that to overcome this scourge we need more than just the president speaking out - we need all of our leaders to condemn these crimes and say in no uncertain terms that we as South Africans will not condone these atrocities with our silence. Our collective stance should be clear: zero tolerance for those who perpetuate violence.
It is said that evil thrives when the good among us keep quiet. This is as true in the religious community as it is in every other sector. The questions must be asked: where are the community leaders? Where are the business leaders? And dare I say, where are the religious leaders? We are too quiet, or our responses are not good enough. Women and children are crying out for our leadership.
I hold a strong conviction and belief that gender-based violence is a crime of power - one that seeks to uphold patriarchal laws and control the female body in the framework of historically unequal power structures between men and women. It is a problem that belongs to society and therefore a crime by society.
We must all face up to this crime and address it in our different areas of operation - in education, in the workplace, in our religious institutions, in our homes, in our laws and in just about every sphere of society.
We must all stand up and be counted, especially men from all walks of life, and sing with one strong voice #Notinmyname.
*Pastor McCauley is president of Rhema Family Churches and chair of the National Religious Leaders Council
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.