Rape survivors benefit from media house's "67 minutes"

19 Jul 2010

A recent study revealed that a child is raped every three minutes in South Africa, many of them by someone they know. RamsayMedia staff took that cause to heart for their Mandela Day initiative, supporting the NGO Matla A Bana: A Voice against Child Abuse by contributing to items and assembling "comfort packs" for young girls experiencing the trauma of reporting the rape and undergoing medical examination.

Sandy Immelman (far left) was the driving force behind RamsayMedia’s Mandela Day initiative. She presented 150 “comfort packs” to Matla A Bana founder Monique Strydom and Brigadier Joseph Makhura and Brigadier Gerhard Jantjies of the Western Cape Provincial Detectives Office.

Matla A Bana distributes the packs - designed to provide some comfort in the form of a snack, juice, sanitary pads, underwear, a teddy bear, toothpaste and tooth brush and colouring books and crayons, among other things - to detectives, courts and rape clinics. The contents are packaged for four-to-eight-year-olds and nine-to-12-year-olds.

RamsayMedia collected more than R10 000 in corporate and staff contributions, while suppliers and retailers were quick to add their contribution when they heard about the initiative. RNA, the company's magazine distributors, gave money and goodies, underwear manufacturers Easywear donated panties and Cosmetics 71 contributed boxes of deodorants.

The staff put aside Friday afternoon to assemble the comfort packs (150 in all) in what one RamsayMedia staffer described as "a heart-wrenching experience - it is absolutely devastating to imagine why a six-year-old girl would need personal toiletry items".

Packs are a real comfort

Receiving the packs, Monique Strydom, national manager of Matla A Bana, said experience showed they were a real comfort to the young girls and made it easier for them to open up to police about what they had gone through.

She added: "We have to stop expecting the police to take the responsibility for sorting out crime. Crime is perpetrated members of our communities; it is therefore the responsibility of communities to start reporting crime and have these perpetrators arrested.

"There should also be much closer working relationships between companies, government and NGOs who can all contribute in this war against child rape. It is not necessarily funding that is needed - people can dedicate time and talent as well. This project is a wonderful example of how one initiative mobilised a company to mobilise staff, who mobilised other suppliers/companies to help those in need. A lot of goodwill was created here!"

Matla A Bana was founded eight years ago by Monique and her husband, Callie. The couple was taken hostage in the Philippines in 2000, an experience that changed their lives and set them on the path of helping those in need.