#TotalShutdown: Why do we have to beg for safety?

Being a media professional, one of the first rules you are taught is to be unbiased.

If you remove your personal feelings from the story and stick to only the facts, the message is crystal clear.

Sadly, in recent years these lines have become so blurred on a personal level.

I set out to join the hundreds of women in the #TheTotalShutDown march, thinking being part of the movement would be historic and empowering. And although the experience delivered exactly that, it was also emotionally crippling.

Suddenly you’re part of a large group of women with tears streaming down your face, trying to comprehend why we have to beg for our safety. Trying to comprehend what we did so wrong that it is almost as if, as a friend calls it, we’ve sinned by simply being female.

And in that moment, my emotions were amplified, seeing posters of women who had died at the hands of men who had no regard for their lives, making it exceptionally hard to be stoic and unbiased.

Being part of #TheTotalShutDown quickly became a very emotional moment for me to be privileged enough to share in as I was walking shoulder to shoulder with the many women activists I have met over many years who are survivors of rape, survivors of domestic violence and more importantly, survivors of themselves.

I believe we have many more strides to make before we women are truly free, when there would be no need for us to take a day off work to have our message heard, when we do not have to beg our government to fulfil its mandate of protecting our rights.

There have been many marches to the gates of Parliament with memorandums being handed over, even for the same cause as the shutdown. Yet, years on, we are still crying in masses because our sisters and mothers are being hurt and we have no sense of when this will all stop. We have called “enough is enough” over loudhailers, but nobody hears us outside of the crowd.

I wish dispelling the perpetrators of abuse and rape was as easy to teach as it was in a first-year journalism class where, years on, you still heed the warning.