August, Women’s Month, for me was full of painful memories of the same time last year.
Three East London women were brutally murdered — Angelique Clarke-Abrahams, Leighandre “Baby Lee” Jegels and Uyinene Mrwetyana.
Writing for Dispatch sister paper Go!&Express, I covered two of those emotionally charged memorial services.
For me, GBV, the acronym for gender-based violence, is more than a hashtag for a movement that is forgotten after the taste has worn off.
Countless women have lost their lives and hashtags at least help to keep their memory alive.
On August 30 I was filled with mixed feelings, among them apprehension, about covering the first anniversary of Jegels’s death.
In journalism a reporter is typically told not to become personally involved in a story.
But how, as a female journalist, does one successfully cover such a story?
It was a difficult assignment. I am a human being before I am a journalist.
The raw emotion on the faces of the Jegels family struck a chord.
The balance I tried to find was a thin line in reporting from a “safe” distance from my personal GBV experiences.
Jegels, 25 when she died, was an enormously talented sportswoman who excelled in hockey, karate and boxing.
Her trophies adorn the lounge as you walk in through the family’s front door, testament to an array of achievements in such a young life.
An avid biker like her parents, her motorcycle is still there in the garage, along with the Peugeot 208 cabriolet she bought after her first boxing victory.
August 30, the anniversary of her death, was a day of tears and memories for a life well lived.
Equally difficult for me was talking to Baby Lee’s mother, Rita, as she retraced the events leading up to the moment her daughter was shot dead, and she herself was shot and injured.
Rita had accompanied Baby Lee to take out a protection order against her policeman boyfriend on August 1 2019.
What makes it even tougher is the fresh wave of femicide in the past three weeks reported nationally and in the Dispatch.
On September 7, in Mthatha, right inside Madeira police station, a woman was shot five times as she was filing a protection order against her husband.
On September 5, in Butterworth, Asalinto Lumkwana was stabbed, allegedly by her boyfriend outside his home.
On August 24, at Xunu village near Mthatha, Noloyiso Gengqa, 35, was shot in the back of the head in front of horrified colleagues by a man holding her down with his foot on the grounds of Mandleni Junior Secondary School.
On August 20, in Dutywa, a young student who dreamed of being a doctor, Asithandile “Kwasa” Zozo, was stabbed to death in front of her little sister, allegedly by her boyfriend.
Emotions aside, it is important to be as objective as possible when covering all stories.
But the question that lingers at the back of my mind every time I hear of a woman being killed by a partner is — where can women ever feel safe?
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