CHARMAIN NAIDOO: Graceless Grace and others who abused women
'According to Gabriella, Grace hit her over and over and over again with an electric extension cord until her head bled'
Women are at risk. That’s it. At risk. All women.
Being a woman is risky business, everywhere in the world, but (most importantly to us South Africans) right here under our own noses.
I don’t mean that they’re at risk of attack just from men. They’re under attack from women too.
If you have thought – or even rolled your eyes at the thought – that we’d got it all out of our system, that the litany of grievances highlighted by the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s had somehow made women less vulnerable, boy (girl?) did you get it wrong.We might have the vote, and the right to make choices about our bodies with access to abortion and contraception, we might be able to open our own bank accounts, and buy houses in our own names, and hold down a job, and divorce our husbands just because we want to rather than having to provide a reason that the courts might or might not accept. We might have all of that and yet, little has changed for women since the 1960s with no guaranteed safety for women. There is still extreme discrimination in the workplace with unequal pay at the core of it… There is an unspoken – shrug of the shoulders, shake of the head – acceptance of rape; why else would we South Africans live with a United Nations statistic that a woman or ch...
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