B-Metro Comment: Say NO to gender based violence!

Serious attitude problems still dog our society and continue to lead to many cases of gender-based violence.  

People tend to think that there is a class of people that engage in violence and assume that the rich, well known or educated citizens are neither perpetrators of violence nor victims of such.  Well, think again.

What is quite clear is that there are certain mindsets, beliefs and behaviours that manifest through attitudes towards the other sex.  Some of the attitudes lie buried under false masks that fall off behind closed doors, or after the person takes a beer or two, while some make no attempt at all to hide their sickening attitude towards the opposite sex.

The media has been awash with reports of the Babes Wodumo and Mampintsha debacle, where a video of the latter beating up his girlfriend was beamed on Instagram, shocking the social media world and prodding even the girl’s family to take action.It is our view that the violence that broke out on social media to expose Mampintsha was a culmination of a series of events or stages of attitude issues where one seeks to dominate, control using several ways and resorts to violence when these seem not to give them the desired result.  Also, it would seem the couple had a history of such fights that were however, hidden from the camera and could easily be dismissed while the couple continued to wallow in denial.

Our plea to those that find themselves under such a grip of violence is that they should seek help. Hoping that your partner will someday wake up and change is just a mirage that prolongs one’s suffering. Usually partners that lack self-esteem are plagued by certain insecurities that then see them seek to control the other party due to a fear of losing them to someone else that they may feel inferior to.

Both the perpetrator and victim need professional help.  Just in the same week, there were also Press reports of a woman whose nudes were being splashed on social media by a jilted boyfriend who argued that he would continue to release more pictures since the woman hurt him by ditching him when he had spent a lot of money on her.

The element of control can be seen in the attitude where the rights of the partner do not matter but his warped interests, of deriving sadistic pleasure from the release of nude pictures. Violence takes many shades and with some it is not physical but psychological, where one party makes the other feel less than human through use of hurtful words, insults and declaratory statements over someone’s future.

Some people are continuously being told they are useless, they will not amount to much and so on and so forth. This is mental violence, whether it happens in the home or at the workplace, it should never be tolerated.

Let us stand up and say no to violence by speaking out and shaming perpetrators instead of being complicit by wearing masks and pretending everything is well. When cases of violence are reported, let us also see the law take its course so that those in similar circumstances are not discouraged by the outcomes.