Chairperson, hon Minister and hon members, Cope is fully supportive of the global campaign which focuses on ending gender violence. It has been running here in South Africa since 1998.
Chair, as from next week, the NCOP, the government and the corporate sector will act as a uniting force to make this year's slogan a powerful tool with which to tackle gender violence. The slogan is "Commit, Act, Demand: We can end violence against women".
Gender violence is common in our country. Its presence blights the good name and reputation of our country. Quite often, gender violence is linked to sexual abuse. Each year nearly a quarter of all children under the age of 18 years are sexually abused. We've been in this crisis for far too long and it is an indictment of all of us that this sorry state of affairs continues yearly.
Surely our government can start to act decisively to bring all those who commit violence against women and children to book. The President should open his hotline for the two weeks exclusively to women and children to report gender-related and violent acts.
The Stop Gender Violence Helpline offers such services, but by opening the presidential hotline for just two weeks, people will get the message that government is very serious about tackling this terrible conflict in society. Annually, over 1 000 children are murdered in our country and over 2 000 children come close to being murdered. Over the past few days we heard of a young boy who was murdered in Cape Town; three weeks ago and an 84-year-old woman was raped in Port Elizabeth in an old-age home.
What kind of people live in our society who can unleash such violence against women and children? Government has allowed this situation to go too far. We should be debating this issue every quarter so that we can get reports on what is being done to change this situation.
Another way of empowering women is through education. The life skills curriculum used in schools can be extended to women through volunteers and organisations. While empowering women is one thing, educating men is of equal importance. In most cases, men are the perpetrators of gender violence. Government must, therefore, target at least 50 communities where gender violence is prevalent for the coming year.
Today, as we look ahead to the year's campaign, we should be focused on the audit of the campaign to determine its success. If we only make feel-good speeches nothing will happen. We should have statistics after the campaign to get a broad view of what was done and achieved.
Chair, I want to make a strong appeal to government to undertake an audit of the 16 Days of Activism and to let us have the report for evaluation. Together we can make it work.
Lastly, we ask the Minister to ask other departments such as the Department of Safety and Security, the Department of Health and the Department of Correctional Services to join hands in this campaign. We also want to mention to the Minister that child trafficking is one of the fundamental abuses of children and combating it should also be seen as a priority in this phase. Thank you very much. [Applause.]