I am numb. A woman, 27, kicked, set alight in the Free State by her boyfriend, 20, for drinking with friends.
A woman, 25, killed, chopped and put in a red bag on a Joburg highway. A woman, 28, pregnant, hanged from a tree and left dead in Roodepoort. And closer to home… Sibongiseni Gabada, 34, brutally murdered. Her half-naked and semi-decomposed corpse found in a sport bag next to a shack at H-section in Khayelitsha on Friday May 29. Her boyfriend has since been arrested.
The surge in the killing of women is disturbing. It is too much.
I am left numb because women are dying at the hands of people who probably have told them time and again how much they love them.
Women are dying at the hands of people close to them violently.
The month of June has been a shameful one. It has been a dark month. No matter how angry one is, there is no reason to take a life.
The surge is deeply disturbing. Every time, I see these headlines, my question is, how does one feel after the killing? Do you get satisfaction that you snuffed out a life?
Are we not getting tired of the killing? What is our conscious telling us? Where are men’s voices on this issue? We need to be up in arms about our loved ones. These are our mothers, sisters, daughters and nieces. We should not be this quiet. Let us stand up to protect them. The bad apples among us should be weeded out. How, I don’t know but we cannot tolerate killers. It should not even be a topic. Murderers should be dealt with.
Murderers should not have a place in any society.
The things that we do to women are pathetic and satanic. We must not keep quiet when we see these ugly scenes, even on social media.
Are men not supposed to protect these very same women they are killing? It is time for men themselves to stand up against this cruelty. It is about time that society stops blaming the justice system and police but work with it.
For society to win this fight, it will need unity. We need to remember that this is coming to each one of us. It might sound far, but it is coming.
We always look for reasons why people did the bad. It is now time to stop reasoning for such heinous crimes and to lock the perpetrators behind bars.
It is now a time when men – real men – should take action. We cannot wait for the government to act while we can. These things happen right where we live.
The sooner we act, the better our society becomes. To all men, stop the killings.