The 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children campaign kicks off this week, and it’s important to understand why it is actually necessary for such initiatives.
It is a sad indictment against our world when most awareness campaigns in it call for people to be, and act as, decent human beings.
We pride ourselves in being evolutionary beings, content in our state of technological advancement to which we usually link cognitive development. But if we are as evolved as we claim, why then can’t we protect the ones among us we have a responsibility to safeguard from harm?
We tend to put the suffering of our women and children on the back burner, so they find they have to fight, not only for their rights, but their protection in a society that constantly sees them victimised, killed, raped and undermined.
We are all living in a fool’s paradise if we believe we have made progress here. Ever more women are coming forward to report heinous crimes committed against them, and we need to ramp-up our efforts to mitigate – no, eliminate – all the harm being done against them.
We can march, pray and protest all we want, because while that black T-shirt for creating awareness in the streets is being thrown into the wash, a few dozen more women are being killed and raped. So we all need to do more, to do better.
