IGNORANCE IS A SILENT KILLER.

 

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I often get told that I focus too much on the negative things rather than the positive things that are going on in this country; that is not true at all, I see the beauty of this country and I try my best to enjoy the privileges that have been given unto me but I cannot turn a blind eye and pretend that all is okay when It’s not.

Sometime last year I remember seeing on the news a story of a little girl who was raped by a teenage boy who also took out her eyes. Soon after that story, there was a report on the news again about a primary school teacher who raped siblings; a 7 year old girl and a 9 year old boy; this continues to happen in our country and I don’t see anything been done to stop it. I’ve recently learned that a woman is raped every 17 seconds and killed every six hours in South Africa (Jimmie Briggs); I know for a fact that I am not safe as a woman in South Africa. Women get raped everyday by strangers, people they trust and by law officials; all these people do it because they know that they can get away with it.  People of the law feel that they can commit any form of crime and get away with because they are well connected within the system. Where is the justice? What happened to right and wrong?

Photo taken from google images

Two days ago while I was watching my favourite drama series “InterSexions” I saw a lady being raped because she is a lesbian. I remember the perpetrators saying to her “we are giving you what you’ve been missing” as if they were doing her a favour by raping her. We hear of similar incidents all the time and do nothing; it’s like we have accepted rape as something normal that we can live with; like getting flue.  I remember when I was about 7/8 witnessing mob justice; a man had raped a little girl who was actually a friend of mine and everyone in my community beat him up. I remember my dad coming inside the house to collect his shambock and I followed him out to see what he was going to do with it. That is the type of justice we need, where the people come together to fight for what is right.

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There’s a movie that I love so much called LAW Abiding Citizen; in that movie, two people break into a man’s house to rob him; when they get there, they discover that he has a wife and a baby girl. So they hit him and tie him up and start stealing, while he’s lying there on the floor defenseless,  his wife comes and she screams when she sees him lying there; one of the guys hits the wife, rapes her, kills her; then the little girl comes and he does the same to her. During the trial of the case, the victim’s lawyer makes a deal with the guy that did this because he didn’t believe that they could win the case even though a woman and a little girl were brutally raped and murdered. The victim was so devastated and said that he will testify because he was there and had seen what happened; the lawyer then said to him “It’s not what you know but what you can prove in court” the justice system had failed the poor man. 10 years later, after studying law books and how the justice system works, the man killed the perpetrators and everyone who was involved with that case and proved that he could kill people and get away with it.

The moral of the story here is, if the justice system fails us, then we must come with our own system that will work for us and bring about justice. One person alone cannot do it, but together we can. When we start to take action against crime and violence, more and more victims will come out and report their cases and that will lead to more justice being served. We must not feel sorry for people who commit such crimes because they know that it is wrong; “if you do the crime, you must be willing to do the time”. It took the whole nation to fight against apartheid because there were tired of living in fear, let us stand together once again and protect our children, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, nieces, aunts,  and our sisters. The time is now, let us stop accepting such behavior, break the silence and make sure that justice is served. TOGETHER WE CAN.

Written by

Ntombifuthi Patience Mazibuko

DANGERS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

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Social media is like a daily bread to a lot of young people, and lately it seems middle aged and older people have joined in on the fun as well as businesses. When creating a social media account there are certain terms and conditions that need to be read then agreed upon for security reasons and it would seem that a lot of people choose to ignore this very important step. And because of that reason, social media is now being used as a platform for psychopaths and criminals to do their dirty work.

www.googlimage.com/dangers-of-socia-lmedia

Late last year there was a male in the North West of South Africa who was murdered by a young woman and her boyfriend after agreeing to meet the girl at a cemetery. The boy who was killed and the girl had been friends on 2go (social site) for a while prior the incident. The story was on the news and in most newspapers in South Africa and 3^rd degree (news documentary) did the follow up story early in the year. There was another famous story about a man who was raping women he had found on facebook and the famous mxit kidnap stories that most people would recall.

At first I didn’t really pay attention to all this, it hit me one weekend as I was sitting with my friend at home and got 3 calls from 3 different people who claim to have got my number on facebook, I realized how I wasn’t protecting my private and important information and immediately logged on facebook and removed all that important information. If people can see all that information about you on facebook, they will know where you live, work, etc and that will make it easy for them to plan your murder or kidnapping so make sure that all your important information is secure.

IZIKHOTHANE : WHAT VALUES ARE PARENTS TEACHING THEIR CHILDREN?

Izikhothane: The 18 boys

“Izikhothane” are a group of young men who wear expensive clothing, consume a lot of alcohol and go partying. However, most of these boys do not even come from rich families but the amount of money that goes into a day’s outfit can feed their families for 3 months. Ukukhothana is now a popular culture in most of the townships in South Africa particularly in SOWETO the most popular in terms of history and it being one of the largest.

Sikhothane mom: cutting edge SABC 1

The woman you see in the picture is mother to two ‘sikhothane’ boys, she is unemployed and lives in a 4 room house that is not in good condition and there she is on national television bragging about how expensive their clothes are. My argument here is what values are parents teaching their children? This woman is also the one who gives her boys money to go buy alcohol worth R 5000.00. when I first saw this on television last year I was shocked and thought maybe after people have seen the documentary this madness would stop. But to my surprise, it didn’t stop infact it got worse. Now there are Izikhothane everywhere and I don’t think that it is a positive culture to adopt. Part of being a Sikhothane is to tear money, pour drinks at each other and with all the hungry people all those things can be put to good use.

I believe that we can change the world by changing the way people look at the world. If someone can actually teach these young men piositive values, they might just stop the madness and put that money they spend to good use. And I think our country should have parenting school to teach people how to raise positive people who can bring about positive change to the world one day.

WHEN WILL ENOUGH BE ENOUGH?

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Rape is one of the leading increasing crimes in South Africa and all around the world and instead of rapists feeling any remorse for what they are doing, they are actually justifying it. Early in the year around January, I remember there was an incident where a young lady was being followed by a group of men in Noord Taxi rank in Johannesburg because she was wearing a short skirt. She was harassed and humiliated but the follow up of that case vanished in thin air. And if I remember correctly, an incident of that nature took place a few years ago in the same taxi rank where taxi drivers said; “if a woman comes in my taxi wearing a revealing skirt or dress, I will touch her because she would be asking for it”. I was still in high school and I remember telling my mom that I will not wear all my short skirts because I was so scared.

Woman all around South Africa live in fear of being raped and it seems to me that the system is not doing enough to stop this. In recent occurrences,   17 year old girl was gang raped by 6 men and two of these men are suspected to miners meaning they are under the age of 18. What shocked me when I read about this story was the reality of it, what kind of role models do these young men have. There are a lot of campaigns being done on rape but I feel that people don’t realize how important something is until it happens to them.

Here’s something I would like to live you with; Rape is like murder, when a person gets raped not only do they lose their dignity but they lose their souls and the scars never heal. Don’t wait for it to happen to you or someone you love. LET US STAND TOGETHER IN FIGHTING CRIME!

TEENAGE PREGNANCY: MISTAKE VS SOCIAL GRANT

teenage pregnancy

When I had the whole topic of teenage pregnancy on my mind I had that whole ideology that the increase of it is due to the social grant, but to my surprise that is not the case at all. I had an idea that maybe if they cancel the social grant then we will see the decrease in number of teenage pregnancy, but after what I discovered while doing my research, I realize that it has nothing to do with social grants but the wrong choices teenage girls make and often refer to those choices as “A Mistake”.

According to the human sciences research council(HSRC) the number of pregnancies among  girls aged 15-19 years peaked in 1996, two years before the child support grant was introduced, and has been declining ever since. In addition, only one in five mothers receives the grant. www.hsrc.ac.za/document-2027.phtm. I’m aware that teenage pregnancy is overrated and nobody really wants to talk about it but whether we pay attention or we don’t, it affects our society therefore is affects us and I believe that if we really take the time to think about it, we could come up with ideas that could make a huge difference.

Another issue I don’t get is how teenagers fall pregnant with all the sex education in schools. We know about condoms and other contraceptives but still fall pregnant and say; “It’s a mistake” okay let me get this straight, you know that if you have unprotected sex you will fall pregnant, you do it and expect not to fall pregnant? Whose fault is it really, are parents not talking to their kids about sex? Is it teachers’ maybe? Or the health workers are not doing their jobs well?  All I know is this is a serious problem that really needs to be dealt with not ignored because it leads to illegal abortions and suicide.

As the African National Congress (ANC) slogan so well puts it; “TOGETHER WE CAN DO MORE”. Let us not turn a blind eye, but act and save our nation.

Morden Day Slavery

Morden day slavery also known as human trafficking is one of the biggest social issues we face in our country. We have cases where by people are turned into different types of slaves but the most common slavery is sex slavery. In most instances, girls are moved from foreign African countries like Zimbabwe and are being used for Sex here in South Africa.

Most of these girls are teenagers younger than 19 and they are being put on drugs and most of them end up having HIV/AIDS. There are men and women who own these young girls and sell them to older men for sex and the money paid to these girls goes to those people who are also known as their "Pimps". This is something that has to be taken serious and dealt with.

Most of these girls don't even agree to doing this job, they are either kidnapped or sold by family members due to a poor background. It is really sad to know that there are young girls out there who never get the opportunity to get educated like us and live a free life where they make their own decisions. We really need to deal with these issues and not turn a blind eye...

DANGERS OF TERMINATING PREGNANCY

Termination of pregnancy also known as "Abortion" is one of the leading causes of teenage deaths in South Africa. Statistics show that a lot of teenagers die due to illegal arbotions. It is shocking to have such cases when there are so many ways of preventing pregnancy. The question here is why fall pregnant in the first place?

People have different views concerning this matter, most believe that it is killing and should be illegal; but if u get raped and fall pregnant? Would you keep the child and let that child be a reminder of what happened to you? Yes I know, thought provoking. People have different reasons why they decide to terminate the pregnancy, it is unfortunate that some of them end up losing their own lives in the process. It recent occurrences, a University of Johannesburg student who happens to be a classmate of mine was found dead in her residence room on Sunday after allegedly having done an abortion. We don't know why she did what she did though people feel that she should have known better as she was a student at a university.

whether we are for it or against it, arbotion remains a life threatening process, and even if the state decides to make it illegal, there will always be those back door places that will continue to terminate pregnancies and risk losing more than one life. All we can do is think of effective ways of educating our youth about arbotion and the risks that go with it to prevent lives being lost in future.