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Helping Hands’ Assistant Social Worker raises awareness regarding GBV at Helen Joseph Hospital In Johannesburg.
Non-Governmental Organisation, Helping Hands, says there are only two shelters that cater for men facing gender-based violence (GBV) in South Africa, one in Limpopo and the other in the Western Cape.
The comments come as the country is marking 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence.
The NGO’s Assistant Social Worker, Dickson Solomons states that men are often viewed as the perpetrators who commit all the violence. He says many men need help as they face men-on-men abuse and women-on-men abuse.
Solomons says, “I’m dealing with a case where a good man’s kids have been taken away. The mum is on drugs, she doesn’t want to participate in anything, and she goes to informal settlements to sell herself there. This man has to run after this woman looking for birth certificates just to put his child in school.”
“He is the one being abused by the men she sleeps with; they come after him and hit him, and sometimes she attempts to hit him as well. He has to go around looking for shelter sometimes, fluctuating between having a job and not having a job after all the abuse he’s endured from her.”
He adds, “So that is the kind of man we have on the street, under the bridges. There is nothing for them; even the shelters prioritise catering to women and children first.”
ABUSED MEN
Solomons says, “We have, let’s say, 175 abused men that need shelter, that need a place to stay, that are homeless, and they don’t have anywhere. We, as social workers and assistant social workers, when these men come to us, we don’t know where to take them.”
He says, “We have one disabled client, and a woman is abusing him. He can barely use his hands, but she sleeps with other men and brings them to the house. This woman has tried to kill him; I think he had eighteen stab wounds. He luckily survived her attempt. Her actions were escalating to the next level. Luckily, they found him and took him to the hospital.”
Solomons says men are coming forward to ask for help.
“Men automatically come by themselves… There was a time when the ego was there, now the ego is now gone, it’s like there is nothing. When they come to you, you must know that it’s already big; the ones that have egos are very few.”
