Fix domestic violence – 16 Days of Action

7 December 2018

All around the world activists and the media demand that steps are taken to reduce family violence.  Men, fathers, governments, schools, family breakdown, poverty and dozens of other scapegoats have been paraded with great noise.

Strangely I have heard little constructive.

Yet the police commander of Sasolburg in the Free State Province of South Africa stated that call-outs to family violence had reduced by 50% for a period of two years after 71 pastors had conducted the Billion Child Foundation Win-Win Parenting Skills Programme in the Refengkgotso township. He had been amazed that the community had formed a Community Parenting Forum which had launched a highly successful programme to identify and send addicted children and young people to drug rehabilitation centres.

A survey of 299 parishioners who had been trained by their pastors in Refengkgotso revealed that in most families, anger has been replaced by understanding; encouragement and calm reflection; dysfunction by cohesion, family routines, orderliness and respect; abdication and domination by involvement of all family members in supporting each other; and violence and verbal abuse by dignity, respect and family pride.

IT CAN BE DONE!

In January 2019

• SAGA UK funding will enable BCF to train 45 pastors in the dangerous township of Langa in Cape Town  This will impact on an estimated 2,250 families.
• Investec funding will enable BCF to train 15 principals of early childhood development centres/kindergartens in the equally dangerous Diepsloot township in Johannesburg. This will impact on an estimated 375 families.