Research community must step up the challenge to understand root causes of gender based violence
DATE: 11 September 2019
Pretoria, Wednesday 11 September 2019 – The Human Sciences Research Council adds its voice to, and stands in solidarity with, the people of South Africa as the country confronts the severe crisis of gender based violence.
With one woman being killed every three hours, South Africa has the fourth highest interpersonal violence death rate. Many of these murders come at the hands of intimate partners.
Reflecting on the ongoing, and increasingly brutal, incidents of gender based violence, the HSRC’s CEO Professor Crain Soudien said, “Inured, unfortunately, as we have become to the violence our country experiences on a daily basis, the murders and brutality experienced by many young women have hurt us deeply.”
“It is our mandate at the Human Sciences Research Council to understand and make sense of the social realities of our country. We are called on to explain its socio-economic nature and the behaviour of its citizens – what lies behind the inequality and poverty we see and how and why South Africans respond to the social conditions in which they find themselves in the way they do.”
Read the full media statement, issued on 11 September 2019, here.
Image by HSRC science writer Andrea Teagle at the protests against gender based violence held in Cape Town last week.