It’s such a wonderful thing as you get older as a woman that you finally start realising how beautiful and super human, we women are. We are so unkind to ourselves and other women for so much of our lives – comparing, judging and sometimes ridiculing – this is from lack of confidence most of […]
I found out via a phone call from Anne Mayne that Rape Crisis was benefiting from a burlesque revue (and did in fact receive around R36,000 if memory serves). My initial reaction was disbelief and then a sort of creeping horror. I simply could not understand that what I felt was the objectification of women’s […]
A response to the Fifty Shades of Feminism post. To begin, the title of the blog post has my feminist blood boiling. Yes, the populist book had a catchy title, but inside the cover on the pages was the antithesis of strength or did it have very little to do with ‘the personal is political’ motto […]
This photograph from the Rio Olympics sparked debate quickly followed by a storm of outrage and an even hotter debate when France went on to ban the burqa. Feminists were at odds about what this means for women, for religion and for our freedoms. Not all Muslim women oppose wearing the burqa but feminists see […]
Rape statistics in South Africa are as high as ever. If we bear in mind that less than 1 in every 9 rapes is reported, we can see from official statistics that almost 500 000 people were raped in South Africa in 2015. That is half a million people, which amounts to one percent of our […]
“‘Palace politics’ would have us believing that we all hate one another but it isn’t true. South Africans are incredibly kind to one another. We actually care a lot about one another.” Marianne Thamm made this remark as encouragement to a writing group a few days ago and it struck such a chord with me. […]
What is a Thuthuzela Care Centre? Thuthuzela Care Centres, or TCCs, are one-stop facilities for rape survivors. They are unique in that they offer all services (counselling, physical exams, and law enforcement) under one roof. This makes it logistically easier for survivors to report a rape, and helps to lessen the amount of secondary trauma […]
Will you lend us your hands, and give your 67 minutes for Mandela Day? At all four of Cape Town’s forensic units which attend to anyone who has just been raped, Rape Crisis is there to support the survivor reporting the offence. After counselling, opening a criminal case docket, and undergoing a forensic full body […]
On this day, 40 years ago, students took a stand against a violent and unjust system. We salute the courageous youth who fought for change in the 1976 uprisings. Despite the rights we enjoy now, we still have a long way to go in changing attitudes around rape. This Youth Day, we’d like to shine […]
When I made this post, over two weeks ago, I never thought it would go viral. I didn’t even know that it would be used on the Rape Crisis social media pages. Now, the post has been shared over 270,000 times, reached over 27 MILLION people, and has resulted in over 8,000 new likes […]