The tragic death of an Emmarentia mum, allegedly by her husband, has sparked a wave of solidarity and encouraged victims of gender-based violence to come forward. Activists say it’s about time people within the Muslim community acknowledge the existence of GBV and become proactive.
Nazreen Fakier, a mother of three, was reportedly stabbed to death by her husband. 40-year-old Shaheed Cajee was arrested last week after a neighbour was alerted by the couple’s child. It came while the world observed 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence.
While picketers stood outside the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday, magistrate Nishani Beharie denied Cajee’s bail application.
In the days following her murder, many women within the Muslim community have come forward to share their stories and offer solidarity with fellow victims of abuse. Coordinator of the National Shelter Movement, Mariam Mangera said the incident of femicide was “unacceptable”.
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Perpetrator protection
Speaking in an interview on Salaamedia, Mangera said the sad reality was that many men were perpetrators within the Muslim community, but are protected by society.
Her organisation provides a 24-hour hotline for women in need of safety from abusive spouses. Even though such organisations make a positive contribution towards ending GBV, it is not enough.
“We need to start doing better.”
“There are a lot of organisations and many activists in the space trying to make an impact,” she said, “However, our biggest problem is that as a community we are protecting perpetrators”.
She described it as “one of the biggest problems we found in the wake of Nazreen’s tragic death”.
WhatsApp groups had sprung up in the wake of the tragedy, with many women coming forward about their own stories of abuse. It was concerning to Mangera that many of those women reported being silenced by their families amid domestic abuse.
“Even more troubling is the fact that they are talking about their family silencing them; refusing to allow them to be divorced.”
“How many more Nazreen Cajees [Fakier] are we going to bury before our community realises that we are the problem when we protect these perpetrators in our communities? This is not acceptable,” she lamented.
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Proactive responses to GBV
Mangera said education was a critical component of efforts against GBV. The first step was for members of the community to “unlearn that
violence is acceptable”.
According to Mangera, the government spends a meagre R75 per day for an international woman and her children living in a shelter. However, she said, this was significantly less than the R350 spent on jailed perpetrators.
“At the same time, women shouldn’t be the ones that are being removed from their homes and placed into shelters. Men need to be removed from those places and they need to put people into rehabilitation centres.”
She said perpetrators of gender-based violence needed to be trained to manage their anger as well. Furthermore, Mangera said, religious leaders also needed to “come to the party”.
Mangera stated a recent amendment to the Domestic Violence Act obliged people with knowledge of domestic women and child abuse to come forward, or face jail time themselves.
“Now that you have a legal obligation, I’m hoping that people will start standing up for their neighbours, for their nieces, for their sisters, for their mothers and just by speaking up you can help because the right kind of help can be brought to those victims and then they can become survivors,” she said.
Silencing victims would ultimately harm the community as a whole.
