Press Statement: Vulnerable women and children evicted from Place of Safety.
‘Turning their backs on abused women and children.’
This is how the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) describes the eviction on Thursday in Eersteriver of the mostly so-called Coloured women and children from the Geneva Centre for Abused Woman.
A number of women and children who suffered various forms of abuse and family violence were previously referred to this centre, this place of safety, by the local police station and social workers.
According to these vulnerable families, a number of men who only identified themselves as “officials carrying out the command of the local authorities”, arrived at the centre and started to toss them out onto the street.
These battered woman and children were thrown out to face the elements with all their belongings, where they remained for a second night yesterday out in the cold, threatening darkness.
Bernard Joseph, Chairperson of the Economic Freedom Fighters in the Western Cape and fighters from the Cape Town metropole yesterday visited the affected residents after being informed of the eviction.
A shocked Joseph says the EFF strongly condemns this incident as a direct attack on the poor and vulnerable. “None of these people who executed the eviction produced any documentation to the residents to prove the legitimacy of their actions,” he says.
Joseph denounced the action as illegal and immoral as no court, municipality or landlord has a legitimate right to throw people out on to the street – not withstanding the reasons and circumstances as to why these women and their children were on this premises.
He says poverty is rife in the Western Cape. With this people suffer many forms of abuses of which vulnerable woman and children suffers the most. “Previously marginalised communities are worst off as there are little or few facilities and resources to accommodate the so-called Coloured and African Black victims of such abuses.
The current ratio of an estimated one social worker to every 4 000 disadvantaged people per residential area in this province, contributes to the neglect and further destruction of these communities already dwindling but important family structures and demise.”
The EFF demands the DA led City of Cape Town and the Western Cape Social Development Department, under whose watch this abuse has taken place, to intervene immediately.
