A Novel Idea To Help Solve South Africa's Sexual & Gender Violence Problem

The approaches South Africa has been following to reduce appalling levels of sexual violence and femicide are clearly not working.

Annually, a 16 Days of Activism against Women and Child Abuse campaign is celebrated with much fanfare and little results. Consecutive ministers of police and justice pay lip service to beefing up resources to support women and child survivors of sexual crime.

In 2009, President Jacob Zuma established a department dedicated to women, children and people with disabilities. Five years later women got their own dedicated ministry, but is criticised for being woefully irrelevant — even counterproductive.

Now writer Rebecca Davis has put forward a "modest proposal": to shift the responsibility of ending violence against women to men by appointing a male Minister of Women:

"Putting a man at the helm of the Department of Women would send an important message: fixing the mess that is gender relations in South Africa requires men, more than women, to step up." 

Davis anticipates a number of counterarguments. For example, by reasoning that one doesn't expect other ministers to have personal experience in the portfolios they are leading:

"We don’t require the minister of sports to be fit; we don’t expect the minister of social development to be poor; we don’t even ask that the minister of finance has a basic accounting background. Why should women’s issues be the one area in which we demand lived experience?"

Her proposal certainly merits contemplation, because as one commentator wrote below the article: "It sounds so crazy it just could work."