Studies revealed disturbing figures showing that at least 14% of married women said their current husband or partner had forced them to have sex in the past year, while another 37% had been subjected to sexual violence at some point in their relationship.
A recent Gender-Based Violence Indicators study conducted by Gender Links and the Medical Research Council found that 7.8% of South African women had experienced intimate partner sexual violence in the past year, while 19% of women had experienced such violence in their lifetime.
Similarly, when a woman is killed or battered by her husband, the story is framed as a love triangle gone wrong. Rarely do reporters dig deeper to investigate causes or patterns of violence, linking them to poverty levels, lack of human rights protections (or knowledge of them), or legal systems that take forever to hear and pass verdict on cases of gender-based violence.
Rarely do media report on the massive cost of gender-based violence in terms of treatment of injuries and sexually-transmitted disease, not to mention missed work hours. What about the invisible but extensive cost to our society when this cycle of violence is passed down from absent abusive fathers to their children.
Why don’t journalists write about this?
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