You are not alone: A crusade to shame the nation into action

The infamous Sebina saga has lifted the lid on sexual exploitation suffered by many women and children, along with blatant collective failures to deal with the issue. 

For over a week now, the Men and Women against All Sexual Abuse of Children, a group created by the organizers of the #IShallNotForget movement, has been flooded with the latest in the ongoing saga and a deluge of women who have shared their own, unrelated stories of assault.

“It has truly been overwhelming,” exclaimed the spokesperson of the movement, Tumie Mohoasa. The online platform has clearly opened a rare vent for the frustrations of many women who suddenly find themselves able to talk openly about victim-blaming, male domination, and our patriarchal system,” Mohoasa explained adding that, “Sexual violence is evidently an emergency issue in our country, but it has not been treated as such for a long time. Our hope is for this movement to not stop in social media. We need to fight sexual violence offline and do everything we can, using the skills we have”.

One of the women who shared their story, Thandiwe Moalosi knows more than anyone what the other victims are going through and how such abuse will change their lives forever. She was 19 years when a lecturer “forced” himself on her in his office. For 10 years she was silent about the abuse and pain until recently.

“We numb it out, or we pretend it didn’t happen, or we say nothing about it because we fear we won’t be believed,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard for us to believe that happened. A lot of times we want it to go away, we want to normalise it. But it never goes away.” Moalosi says it was the Sebina incident that prompted something in her to share her story. “I always felt hesitant to call myself a survivor, because I thought it would somehow diminish the experiences of the women I know who have experienced greater violence and trauma. Admitting my experiences to myself opened something up in me and I knew that I needed to share that in solidarity and for my own healing,” she said.

But most of all, ”I want to do whatever I can do to empower other people to get help or report what happened to them.” She hopes her story will help other survivors of sexual abuse understand they are not alone.

According to Mpho Moengwe, a manager at Women Against Rape (WAR) in Maun, there is a stigma that exists about what a sexual assault is, and who the assailant may be. “There is still a lot of skepticism about women who report sexual assault,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s related to those entrenched negative stereotypes about women who are sexually assaulted. This notion that the rape victim should be this virginal young girl and the rapist is an attacker with a knife in the bushes.”

Moengwe says someone reacts to a report of sexual assault by asking the victim why he or she didn’t fight back, they are placing responsibility and blame on the victim. “This victim blaming, by self or others, perpetuates a culture where rape survivors are discouraged from coming forward.

Both Moengwe and Moalosi stress that the focus should be on the perpetrators of violence, not the women who were assaulted. “We shouldn’t keep focusing on individual women and what they did or didn’t do. They are not responsible for the sexualized violence committed against them,” Moalosi said. “The attention should be on the perpetrator and why they felt entitled to enact that violence.” Many activists hope that this is a moment to take the debate about sexual violence against women nationwide, to the government and to shame the country into action.