Human Rights Day

No right hits home as much as the right to freedom and security of the person as well as children’s right to be protected from maltreatment, neglect, abuse, or degradation do. These rights are important to me because I am a daughter, a sister, a cousin, a niece, a granddaughter. I am a family woman. There is no greater feeling than knowing that my family is protected wherever they may be.

Human Rights Day, and the celebration thereof, often focuses a lot on the right to freedom. This is understandable in a highly political country with a history such as ours. Human Rights Day, amongst other things, serves to emphasise the importance of our human rights and the need to uphold and respect these rights. South Africans have a good understanding of their right, and that of others, to freedom. I think it is time we focused on emphasising the importance of the right to security and the children’s right to protection.

South Africa is a nation so free that even its criminals are free, running rampant as they rape everyone from babies to grannies. This is the reality we are living with and have to face. We can no longer run away from the problem and look to our history of our apartheid to make ourselves feel better about our nation and “how far we’ve come”. When focusing on the right to freedom, our apartheid past, gives South Africa an opportunity to say “look how far we’ve come, we’ve done so well”. The people’s oppression is the past, it is no longer a problem, but violence and crime are our present problems that need to be addressed. I am not saying that racism has been eradicated in this country, nor am I saying that all of South Africa is free and that the issue of freedom is an insignificant one. What I am saying is that I think we get the picture.

We need to encourage our people to fight for a safer South Africa just as hard as they fought for a free South Africa. We ought to make the helpless mother believe that her fight against infant rape is a fight worth fighting, that that is not “just the way it is”. South Africans need to believe in the necessity of a safer South Africa just as they did in the necessity of a free South Africa.