Cape Town - To commemorate National Women’s Day, a group of Crossroads residents marched through Nyanga to the police station to call for an end to gender-based violence and femicide.
The march, organised by community leaders and activists, was also a protest against the police’s lack of progress in the case of 15-year-old Aviwe Mkhosi who was killed and dumped in a wheelie bin in Old Crossroads.
Community activist Pamela Mkhefa said residents were tired of bodies being dumped in the community by unknown killers who were never apprehended.
Mkhefa, one of the organisers, said that since 2010, there had been several incidents in which vulnerable people had been gruesomely killed and their bodies disposed of in a similar way.
“When I heard about the murder of this young girl, I felt so dejected. I couldn’t believe yet another girl was brutally killed and her body dumped like that. But that’s the reality of the times we are living in now. Women and children are walking targets.
“There is no one doing anything, that is why we decided to host this march, to take a stand as residents of Old Crossroads. That our community is not a dumping ground for killers. We also wanted to stand in solidarity with the family who lost their daughter and the granny whose home Aviwe’s body was dumped outside of.
“What is worse is that the culprit is said to be known to the community, but he has not been arrested. Why is that. What if this isn’t the first time he has done something like this? We need police to act and protect our women and children.
“This is a bittersweet Women’s Day, not at all a celebratory day,” she said.
Sixteen-year-old Anathi Qomoyi said: “It’s not easy living in constant fear that at any moment something can be done to you. This could have been me or my sister, and it’s painful to ponder what she must have gone through. GBV needs to end.”
Several locally-based community organisations participated in the march, including the Desmond Tutu Emavundleni Research Centre.
The group handed over a memorandum to the police.
In it, they asked police to update them about the progress in Aviwe’s case and make an arrest. They asked them to institute GBV-F programmes to address increasing incidents.
The group said it was also calling on the City to speed up its CCTV project in the area and to support neighbourhood watch groups in the area.