The message isn’t getting throughBROWN LEKEKELA dreads the end of the month. Payday means binge drinking. Violence follows. Women turn up battered and distraught at his gate, usually with small children in tow. They have nowhere else to go: Mr Lekekela’s emergency shelter, Green Door, is the only one in all of Diepsloot, a hardscrabble township north of Johannesburg that is home to an estimated half a million souls. The shelter, built in the yard of his humble house, can fit two women and their children, plus maybe one more family on the couch in his office. He runs it on donations and sheer willpower.
Mr Lekekela has a first-aid kit and some training to treat minor injuries. For more serious ones, it can take hours for an ambulance to arrive. Sometimes the women (or their children) have been raped. But with no other income or support, they often end up returning to their abusive partners. “It’s hard,” says the soft-spoken Mr Lekekela. “But if I don’t do it, who will?”
Rape and domestic violence are hard to measure, since victims often suffer in silence. And headline-writers overuse the word...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2m76Nrx
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