EPISODE 12 - Women and the Law

This week Siyayinqoba Beat It! looks at how women can use the law to protect themselves against abuse.  But as the story of Elizabeth Sambo illustrates, even the law sometimes fails to protect women.

"They told me they were tired of me crying!" Sixty year old Elizabeth Sambo sobs as she tells how the police fobbed her off and failed to investigate her case. Elizabeth has suffered more than a decade of physical and emotional abuse from her husband.  She says the abuse started after she accused her husband's brother of raping her daughter. She has been assaulted, knocked down by his car, and threatened with a gun. Despite having had three restraining orders issued against her husband it would appear in the village of Boschfontein in the Nkomazi district close to the Mozambican border, the police do not protect old women.

Daphne Nkosi a paralegal at the Nkomazi Advice office, who helped Elizabeth apply for the restraining orders, is outraged and frustrated by the police inaction. She still, however, encourages women to stand up and use the law to demand protection against their abusive husbands in the hope that the police and justice system will fulfill their roles to protect and serve our people.

In Masiphumelele near Fish Hoek, Cape Town we also meet 31 year old Thabisa Maqweqwana, a mother of two. Thabisa took her ex boyfriend to court for maintenance for her second child and won the case. We speak to an attorney at the Women's Legal Centre, Noluthando Ntlokwana, about the Maintenance Law. She explains the law and what it means for women and children in the communities.

In our final insert we meet 18-year-old Nolizwi Sinama from Lusikisiki. After both her parents passed away in 2005, Nolizwi moved to her grandmother's home.  In that same year, the then 14 year old Nolizwi was approached by a man who said he wanted to marry her. Nolizwi tells us that she was young so she refused this man's request. The 44 year old man then abducted Nolizwi and kept her at his house, in isolation with little or sometimes no food. He then repeatedly had sex with Nolizwi against her will. Eventually she fell pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy.  Nolizwi tells us that she was not allowed to go anywhere by herself, she wasn't allowed to go to school and this man refused to give her money for clothes and food, even for the baby. Then in 2009, Nolizwi heard that there was a campaign in the area to rescue young girls from forced marriages. Soon after hearing this, she went to the police station to report that she'd been abducted and kept against her will. The police took her and her baby to OR Tambo District Municipality mayor, Zoleka Langa-Capa, who in turn took her to a place of safety, the Palmerton Care Centre. The centre accommodates about 100 children who are rape survivors, sufferers of domestic violence and orphans.

Nolizwi is now 18 and her baby is growing up well at the centre. She is back at school and she gets all the care, support and love she needs from the centre. She tells us that the family of the man who abducted her tries to contact her but she's happy at the centre and comfortable that they will never be able to harm her again. Nolizwi's grandmother and family wants nothing to do with her because they say in their eyes she is a married woman ,as Lobola was paid for her, in the form of three cows.