THE heart-warming confession, The Beating Never Stopped (City Press
November 29), by one of your prolific investigative journalists, Jackie
Mapiloko, left a lump in my throat.
I know many abusive men who are not reported to the police by their
partners.
I know of mothers who allow their daughters to be repeatedly raped
by their fathers because if they blow the whistle their breadwinner will be
gone.
Sis Jackie deserves kudos for having the courage to come out and
share her sad story with the rest of the country.
It is a familiar story,
repeatedly played out in our communities. But it had a piercing effect on us
who knew Jackie as a person before she became a pioneering journalist who is
committed to exposing any rot in the social fibre of communities and the failure
of government to deliver service to communities due to corruption.
Jackie is a brave journalist and an honest woman.
However I feel
that her confession has also achieved the opposite by perpetuating the same
cycle of violence that she hoped it would bring awareness of.
I’m saying this because I believe that, given what she says the man
put her through, she should have named and shamed him.
Abuse is like the tango?–
it takes two people for it to happen.
I would have loved to know his name so maybe another sister would
have been saved from him. He could be the same dude who is dating my sister or
about to marry my cousin.
The Sixteen Days of Activism campaign will really achieve its goal
if we know who is doing what to whom instead of giving the perpetrators the
benefit of protecting their identities as if they were the victims.
I’m not impressed with Jackie’s complicity in this regard.
Goodenough Mashego
Mapulaneng