LISTEN: #TotalShutdown welcomes planned summit on gender-based violence
The #TotalShutdown movement against gender-based violence has welcomed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement that a gender summit will be held at the end of August.
Ramaphosa made the announcement in his speech at the government’s Women’s Day commemoration in Paarl on Thursday.
The gender summit was one of the key demands the movement handed over to President Cyril Ramaphosa on the 1st of August when thousands of women marched across the country demanding decisive action from the state to end the scourge of gender-based violence and femicide.
“We must acknowledge, as a government and as a society, that since the advent of democracy we have failed to ensure that the women of South Africa are able to exercise their constitutional right to peace and security, In that sense, we have failed to live up to the promise of 1994,” Ramaphosa said in his address.
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The summit will be convened by the Department of Justice.
“This time around, we want to bring together not only government departments, but also the NGO sector the activists within the space of gender-based violence so we can engage on the 24 demands that we handed over to the president and dissect them per sector. We want NGO’s across the country in those spaces to be involved in the implementation process,” says the #TotalShutdown’s Loyiso Saliso
She says at the end of the summit they expect a gesture of accountability from government.
Some of the 24 demands include the publication of a monthly list of police stations and police officers who have been reported to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) for failing to provide services to survivors of gender-based violence and the adoption of a policy to make prosecutor-led investigations of cases compulsory in order to provide guidance and assist in the gathering of evidence in order to ensure that cases are taken to court.