GBV report card: A crisis totally out of control
Lebogang Mosikare | Monday December 20, 2021 06:00
FRANCISTOWN: Women and girl-children continue to bear the brunt of GBV in the country throughout the year.
In most of these cases, there is a whole body of knowledge that shows that women and girls are trapped in a vicious cycle of abusive relationships with little or no hope of disentanglement. However, this should not be construed to mean that GBV is an exclusively female disaster in Botswana because males also experience it, although at a lower intensity than females. Experts say domestic violence in Botswana and Africa is culturally deep-rooted.
Recently, Justice Lot Moroka of the Francistown High Court decried the fact that patriarchal tendencies are the major cause of femicide cases. Justice Moroka noted this when condemning an abusive convict, Gobuamang Ntsuape to the gallows for the murder of the mother of his ex-girlfriend after she left him because he was abusive.
Justice Moroka’s words are echoed daily by other judicial officers in Botswana although it is evident that the courts’ messages are not yet bearing the desired results.
All GBV stakeholders are of the correct view that people, especially women in Botswana, prefer to suffer silently in abusive relationships because of the fear that if they get out of those relationships it will be tantamount to signing their own death warrants.
Justice Moroka said: “The deceased is, unfortunately, part of the statistics of women who were killed by men in Botswana. On the morning of January 16, 2016, the accused boarded a taxi and went to the deceased’s place of abode. Upon arrival at the deceased’s residence, he met an acquaintance and they shared a cigarette. The accused then entered the house where his ex-girlfriend was living wherein he stabbed her with a knife.”
“...The evidence of extenuation should not be based on speculation but on concrete evidence that was placed before the court...I had rejected as false the submission that the accused found a man coming out of the deceased’s house. Even if he did, they were no longer in love and he (accused) had no business interfering in her life.
Let me now address the issue of infidelity. A love affair is a social contract in terms of which the two parties ought to take care of the mutual interest of each other. Whereas along the way, the other sees the relationship as no longer being useful, they should be free to leave the relationship without the fear of death,” the judge explained. Justice Moroka added: “The excuse that is used by some lovers to kill their partners because they no longer love them must come to an end in this country...The accused is sentenced to death...”
In November, the Minister of Nationality, Immigration and Gender Affairs, Annah Mokgethi told a breakfast meeting with the media that Botswana is still reeling from the effects of GBV. She bemoaned: “According to the World Bank (2019), 35% of women have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence.
At home, the 2018 National Relationship Study revealed that 37% of women and 21% of men reported experiencing some form of violence at home, be it either emotional, physical or sexual at least once in their lifetime.”
“The most common form of GBV experienced is emotional intimate partner violence (IPV) at 31% amongst women and seven percent for men. Of the total, women who experienced GBV, 92% had experienced some form of abuse in childhood whilst 97% of men who experienced IPV and GBV were abused before they reached 18 years of age,” she said. Mokgethi also explained that whilst the country was still grappling with GBV, the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic aggravated the situation.
Mokgethi pointed out that since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, 4,996 GBV cases have been reported to the police. These included murder, rape, defilement, threat-to-kill and indecent assault, she stated.