Gender-based violence often takes place at home or in intimate relationships, taking a traumatic toll on victims, their families and friends
Early on the morning of 25 June, Vuyokazi Yvonne Mathebula, 39, and her neighbour were reflecting on a funeral taking place a few streets away in Block V in Soshanguve, which lies about 30km north of Pretoria. The dead woman had been brutally killed by her son.
Aphane’s mother, Eunice Ntombi Mtsishe, 72, says she cannot reconcile herself to the suspect’s release. “There’s no way that someone could murder a woman like this and be released from jail just like that. I have lost hope in the police because I really don’t see what it is that they’re doing,” says Mtsishe, who often pauses, weeping bitterly, during the interview.
Stats SA’s key indicator report on the 2016 South Africa Demographic and Health Survey, which was conducted between May and November that year and included face-to-face interviews with adults from more than 11 000 households, stated that one in five women with partners – 21% – had experienced physical violence from a partner at some point, and 8% had experienced sexual violence in the previous 12 months.
The friend, who asked to remain anonymous, had known Aphane since 2007. She says she first noticed Aphane being abused in 2011. Having gone to a party together one night, Aphane confided in her the next day that she had been assaulted when she got home.The abuse didn’t stop. Aphane would be beaten up “to the point that she’d be hospitalised”, says the friend. “When I went to check up on her, I could not even recognise her face the way she was injured.
“The fact that they love the abuser … might seem like a completely foreign concept to us, but there is often deep love for and emotional attachment to the abuser,” adds Ashworth. She says abused women might also be held back by a feeling of worthlessness, which is “often instilled by the abuser and concurrent with an already low self-esteem. The abuser repeatedly tells the abused that they are useless, no one else would want them, they are ugly, stupid, pathetic, etc.
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