“Do we have a justice system or just-a-system?” was the question asked by Thandiwe Radebe in her address at the Great Hall on the Rhodes University campus, during this year’s 1 in 9 Sexual Violence = Silence protest’s morning briefing.
“Do we have a justice system or just-a-system?” was the question asked by Thandiwe Radebe in her address at the Great Hall on the Rhodes University campus, during this year’s 1 in 9 Sexual Violence = Silence protest’s morning briefing.
Radebe, of the 1 in 9 Campaign, a feminist organisation fighting for social justice for women, laid a rape charge against her former boss, a captain of the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department. She described to the gathering her subsequent ordeal with the South African justice system.
With this send-off, around 1 550 protesters left the Great Hall and marched in solidarity with survivors of sexual violence.
Now in its fifth year, the annual protest is organised by the 1 in 9 Campaign and Rhodes University’s Dean of Students Office.
It is a day-long event comprising several marches, briefings and a "die-in" demonstration. The protest has grown during the past five years: Eighty people took part in 2007 and this year's event had the greatest number of participants yet.
This protest is characterised by the silence of its participants. They are gagged with duct tape for a day, unable to so speak, eat or drink. The gesture is in solidarity with the eight in every nine women who do not report their rape.
This is not the only way participants record their solidarity.
Men and women in solidarity can choose instead to speak out against sexual violence and correct misconceptions.
Some rape survivors taking part choose to wear T-shirts that identify them as such, and deliberately choose not to restrict their speech with duct-tape.
A participant’s manner of engagement in the protest is revealed by the text on the purple T-shirt they are wearing.
In a brief speech during the lunchtime "die-in", when protesters gathered in the library quad to represent the death and destruction caused by sexual violence by lying on the ground, the event’s main coordinator, Larissa Klazinga, of the Dean of Students Office, encouraged protesters to remain strong in their resolve.
“There is still a long way to go,” she said.
