It seems unbelievable that a year has passed since South Africa’s last National Women’s Day. Like the months between Christmases, the time goes too quickly. Even more unbelievable is that, while we’ve been given this holiday - supposedly a celebration of women and their rights, as entrenched in the constitution - we’ve made so little progress in the past year.

In South Africa, a woman is raped every twenty-three seconds, a fact that surely gives us the dubious status of Rape Capital of the World. This is probably the only country in the world where young virgins, children, are raped in the belief that this act will cure AIDS.

We also have horrific levels of domestic violence and abuse, affecting one in every four households. And yet we’ve been given National Women’s Day. What is there to celebrate?

Perhaps a more pertinent question would be “What is going wrong?”

As far as rape is concerned, education and harsher sentencing are really the only answers. Education of not only the potential rapists, but also of the police and legal fraternity, who often make rape victims feel guilty, as if they somehow encouraged the act. Many women refuse to even report rape for this very reason. Recently a very light sentence was imposed on two men who raped a nine year-old girl. The judge’s reasoning was that undue violence had not been used. The fact that rape, by its very nature, is a violent act, especially when committed on such a young child, was ignored.

The domestic violence, I believe, is largely brought about by the status of ‘ownership’ imposed by many South Africans on their partners. In our couples orientated society, love is often confused with the fear of being alone, which in turn creates a sense of insecurity. It is this insecurity that generates the dangerous phrase “You belong to me”, a phrase that is drummed into us every time we turn on the radio and television, or listen to a CD. Recognise these lyrics? “The boy is mine”, “the one that I belong to”, “I’m everything I am because you love me” “How am I supposed to live without you?”

The notion that one can “belong” to another person instantly makes one partner more powerful. With a few exceptions, this partner is the male. However, it would be a mistake to apportion the blame for this situation to one partner. Relationships are a two way street, one partner imposes ownership, the other accepts it. It’s from this ownership situation that domestic violence - physical, verbal or psychological - flows.

When women, and men, realise that they can live and think without being part of a couple and that no person can live for, or own, someone else, the trend of domestic violence will decrease.

It will decrease even more when people learn to love and have confidence in themselves before trying to love someone else. As Ayn Rand said - “To say ‘I love you’ one first has to learn to say the ‘I’.”

The Dangers of Being Different
By Helga-Lynn Cronje

How old are you? Or, what car do you drive? Are you married? Simple questions. Its seems only when we answer them however that things become rather more complicated. If I told you I was 32, the single, working mother of two children, these facts are no longer just interesting personal details, they become a profile, which according to market researchers has statistically packaged, labelled and pigeon-holed me as a demographical segment of the population.

According to such individuals, these mere morsels of eagerly garnered information are quite enough to predict what I eat, the places I frequent, the clothes I wear, even my most intimate desires. Well, you would say, surely there is nothing wrong with statisticians just doing their job and observing the law of averages? Somewhere in their equations however, in the number which was rounded down or up to the nearest zero, or in the “acceptable margin of error” ,we are losing something of incalculable value; individuality and personal worth.

The real crisis arises when society at large allows these profiles to act as a measure of any one person’s true worth. This form of twisted alchemy, where we believe we can distil and extract the essence of an individual is not only preposterous but also dangerous. We have all, at some time or another, unfairly labelled or pre-judged someone simply because it is instilled in our nature. Our minds express extreme discomfort when faced with the unknown. So we developed means of categorising and explaining everything within our environment, including one another. We appear “programmed” to fear or dislike those things which defy description or conformity. Examples abound. On the covers of magazines we display our definitions of beauty & fashion. On television we are force fed examples of wealth, power and success. One should ask themselves, what happens when we do not conform to these standards. Are we then meant to consider ourselves ugly? Unfashionable? Unsuccessful?

With worldwide communication closing the gaps between countries and continents every day, the global village is at hand. We must take into consideration that as we are brought closer to one another, so we are altered by this encounter. There is a potential that our standards, beliefs and practices may increasingly conform to one unified standard, with diversity and differentiation suffering as a consequence. Or even worse, we may rebel against this invasion and more jealously safeguard our own identities and associations, denouncing all others. Either end of the scale is a step backwards for tolerance and understanding in world terms.

Perhaps, even after being presented with all this, you do not fully appreciate why being different is such a big deal. It seems rather too esoterical and philosophical to be of any relevance. However, bear with me for a moment. Look at your hands, now imagine they are brown, very dark brown. In fact you are an African-American and this is 1950’s America. How would your minority status, your being “different”, affect things now? Imagine again for me, if you will, you are a woman of Arabic descent and this is modern day Iraq. What makes you different and why are you being punished for it? Now you are a homeless child, on the streets of Brazil. How much are you worth, and how does your difference count against you?

What if I were to admit to you, that in reality I am twenty-one years of age, of mixed heritage, rather outspoken and physically deformed. Perhaps your personal perceptions of me might change, perhaps not. But now imagine that this is Germany, 1941, where an Aryan trend is about to sweep the nation, and the physically and the mentally handicapped are going to be the first to suffer the terrifying consequences. In this context, I might very well pay with my life for a failure to conform.

Such are the dangers of being demographically different.