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Dear Don,
A small group of lesbian activists from the poverty-stricken townships of
Cape Town walked into South African parliament on Monday and
convinced their government to finally start fighting the country’s
decades-old scourge of “corrective rape” — where men rape lesbian
women to “turn” them straight. You made that moment possible.
Late last year, these activists called on the world to help them
pressure their leaders to take action on corrective rape. We
answered their call, and more than 170,000 Change.org members from
163 countries joined with them, making this the largest campaign of all time
on Change.org.
Three and a half months later, they succeeded. Teaming up with 23 major
South African organizations, they got some of the most powerful officials
in the country to agree to bring together various government arms and civil
society groups to develop and implement a national action plan to
combat corrective rape.
The ministry officials asked for details of specific cases in need of
immediate attention, committed to a series of meetings beginning in
six weeks, and promised to present concrete proposals to prevent
corrective rape by the next
meeting.
If there was any question about the effect you had, the
chief of staff himself confirmed it: At one point in the
session he explicitly said, in a pleading voice, “Please
don’t petition us again.”
But that’s exactly what we need to do. The government
is making a series of urgent decisions on sexual
violence legislation in the next few weeks, and South
African activists need your help in pressuring them to
follow up their words with tangible action:
Your work led to overwhelming international press
coverage of the campaign, taking corrective rape
from an unspoken epidemic to a prominent international
issue. In the last two weeks alone, the campaign against
corrective rape has been covered by Time Magazine, the
Washington Post, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, San
Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe,
Miami Herald, Seattle Times, ABC News, CBS News,
NBC News, Fox News, MSNBC, Dan Rather, Forbes,
Yahoo! News, Salon, and dozens of global outlets from
Taiwan, Indonesia, Australia, Canada, Spain, and even a Finnish tabloid.
An elated Luleki Sizwe Founder Ndumie Funda (pictured to
the right, alongside the chief of staff from the Ministry of
Justice) called it “an incredible achievement…I humble
myself to the 170,000 people from all over the world who
made this possible. It was about time this happened.”
There is still much to be done, but every Change.org
member should be proud about what has been accomplished here.
In just 100 days, a tiny group of township activists have
managed to mobilize more than 170,000 people from
163 countries and engaged the highest levels of government
to address their demands. That’s incredible.
Thanks for lending your voice.
– Weldon and the Change.org team
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