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Eyewitness News
3 days ago
- Health
- Eyewitness News
How the absence of safe spaces for Black women forges injustice
Dr Lulu Gwagwa 12 August 2025 | 12:59 mental health Gender-based violence (GBV) Women's Month Depression psychology sad emotions. Picture: On the 3rd of August 2018, a young law student at Rhodes University took her own life. Khensani Maseko, who was just 23 years old, had endured sexual violence at the hands of a fellow student. Her decision to take her own life came just days after she had reported the incident, which had occurred three months prior, to the authorities at the university. Unable to bear the pain, she travelled home to Johannesburg with her family to seek mental health support. On that cold August morning, she wrote on her Instagram page: 'No one deserves to be raped!', and just hours later, she would end her young life. Following her death, protests ignited across various South African universities, with students demanding greater investment in mental health support services. Earlier this year, on the 8th of January, Dr. Antoinette Candia-Bailey, who was serving as the Vice President for Student Affairs at Lincoln University in the state of Missouri in the United States, tragically took her own life after being subjected to bullying by the university's leadership. Like Khensani, Dr. Candia-Bailey had reported the struggles that she was battling with weeks prior, and just days before she ended her life, she had sent an email out to several people detailing her deteriorating mental health due to the toxic work environment she was forced to navigate. As with the case of Khensani, Dr. Candia-Bailey's untimely death resulted in protests and a national discussion on the treatment of Black women in academia. These two cases may have occurred in two different geographical contexts, at different times, and for different reasons. But there is a common denominator between them that cannot be ignored – two Black women, having endured traumatic events and feeling unsupported, opted to take their own lives. Both women were gifted, with Khensani having served in the Students' Representative Council of Rhodes University and Dr. Candia-Bailey having achieved significant feats in her journey as an academic administrator, including becoming the first Vice President of student affairs and Chief Diversity Officer at the highly respected Elms College in Massachusetts. Their deaths, and those of many other Black women, compel us to think critically about the state of mental health among Black women, and just as importantly, the progress that has been made in the provision of mental health resources for them. Seven years since the devastating loss of Khensani, South Africa is still grappling with the growing rates of mental illness and suicide among young women. Research indicates that a substantial percentage of young women in South Africa experience mental health issues. A 2021 study by Mthiyane and various other scholars found a 22.2% point prevalence of probable common mental disorders among rural adolescent girls and young women. This aligns with studies, including a 2024 report by the National Planning Commission, which indicates that in South Africa, mental health challenges are a significant concern among young women in particular. The studies indicate high prevalence rates of common mental disorders like depression and anxiety, and an increased risk for those experiencing trauma, HIV, or facing socio-economic hardship. South African women experience mental health problems more acutely than men due to a complex interplay of factors, including high rates of violence and abuse, socio-economic challenges, and the disproportionate burden of caregiving responsibilities. These factors create what researchers refer to as 'a perfect storm of stressors' that can negatively impact mental well-being. What has also emerged from mental health literature in South Africa is that common mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression are seen beyond the racial and class divide, even as Black women are most affected. Professor Simone Honikman from the University of Cape Town and the founder of the Perinatal Mental Health Project (PMHP) explaining it in the context of perinatal women, contends that the core social determinants of mental unwellness in our country include poverty, food insecurity, intimate partner violence, domestic violence, discrimination, social isolation and marginalisation, experiences of adverse childhood events and trauma, and a lack of safety and security. These social determinants extend beyond perinatal women, and more significantly, are both gendered and racialised. Their impact on women in the domestic and workspaces is significant. Black women, confronted with experiences of trauma, discrimination, economic violence and social isolation, are especially affected by mental health challenges. The data is unambiguous on this. The implication is that women in South Africa, particularly Black women, are in need of not just mental health support but also safe spaces in which they can exist as fully human. The creation of such spaces is critical if we are to arrest the growing crisis of Black women's mental health challenges in both the productive and the reproductive space. It is especially important that Black women are provided the necessary support to facilitate their empowerment because it is only when Black women are supported and empowered that we can begin to forge communities that thrive. Such communities must be built on material and non-material support, anchored on psychological safety. In the second part of this conversation, we will explore the meaning of psychological safety and locate it within the context of the support required to achieve women's empowerment. We will answer the question: 'What are safe spaces for Black women and how can these be created in South Africa?' Defining safe spaces and engaging in a process of co-creation of these spaces is a necessary step towards protecting and supporting young Black women. The death of Khensani and so many others like her, who felt unsupported, in Africa and beyond, should be a reminder of the kind of society we do not want. Lulu is an accomplished development planner, business leader, philanthropist and founder of Traversing Liminality.
Scotsman
17-07-2025
- Politics
- Scotsman
How Keir Starmer is sticking to Margaret Thatcher's flawed ideology that only helps wealthy elite
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It was an ordinary 1970s' day, in the Students' Representative Council office in St Andrews, when I first encountered the emerging ideology of Thatcherite neoliberalism, in all its questionable glory. It appeared in the form of a pale youth from Arbroath wearing an undergraduate red gown – a garment which itself amounted to a political statement, in an age when regulation student gear involved bell-bottomed jeans, tank tops and duffel coats. Michael Forsyth – for it was he, now Baron Forsyth of Drumlean – began to ask me searching questions, in my capacity as SRC treasurer, about what the council's officers were up to, with the modest amount of public money we received; and although I was able to provide him with answers, I remember being slightly shocked by his apparent assumption that we were all up to no good, making expensive rail trips to London for sheer pleasure, rather than for tedious National Union of Student meetings, or some soggy and rainswept demonstration. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Over the next few months, I met a few more of the group of Tories to which the young Mr Forsyth seemed to belong; and I soon began to recognise, if never fully to understand, their profound and mocking hostility to the postwar settlement in which we had all grown up, with its emphasis on a new international order based on human rights and equality, its generous state provision in some areas including higher education, and its assumption that some areas of the nation's life and economy were sacrosanct public goods, to be kept free of commercial motives and pressures. Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit waves to the crowds from Conservative Central Office after the Conservatives won the 1987 general election (Picture: Rebecca Naden) | PA A lavishly funded cause From the outset, it seemed clear to me that their politics was based on the demonstrably false assumption that human beings are motivated almost entirely by individualistic self-interest, that they value nothing unless they have personally paid for it, and that all the more altruistic, convivial, collaborative and creative aspects of humanity should therefore be sidelined, in constructing political and economic systems. Yet within a few years, these young proto-Thatcherites and their disruptive ideas – badged as radical, but often simply reactionary – had taken control of the Conservative party, and then of the UK Government. Their strength, of course, lay not in the quality of their thinking, but in the popularity of their ideas about deregulation and the rolling back of the state with those who already had wealth, and wanted to be free to make more. Their cause was therefore lavishly funded from the outset; and their greatest success – as Margaret Thatcher herself pointed out – was not their triumph over more moderate forms of Conservatism, but their huge impact on the politics of the Labour party, which – under Tony Blair and since – simply absorbed many of their ideas, tropes and values. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad So fast-forward, if you will, to the world this ideology has created for us, and which we inhabit today; a world not only destabilised at global level by a growing culture of contempt towards the universal values on which the postwar generation tried to found a rule-based international order, but apparently trapped, at UK level, in a Groundhog Day of ideological attachment to a Thatcherite revolution which, it is now widely acknowledged, did not fundamentally revive the UK economy, but instead profoundly weakened it. Labour's performative cruelty This is a UK, after all, in which Labour politicians still apparently think it clever, as a badge of political strength and economic wisdom, to stage acts of performative cruelty against some of the weakest in society. It's a country crippled by chronic under-investment in its people and infrastructure, where politicians both Labour and Tory still prate about reducing public spending, and avoiding taxes on ever-increasing accumulations of wealth. And it's a society surrounded and weighed down by the wreckage of a whole raft of failed privatisations of public utilities – energy, railways, England's water – where we still, in defiance of all evidence, see further involvement of private health care companies constantly touted as the way forward for the NHS. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad We are living, in other words, in an age of almost unique ideological stalemate, when the consensus of the last four decades and more has clearly failed, socially, environmentally, and in terms of global security; but where all other political ideologies have been so successfully marginalised that we have nowhere else to turn – except, of course, to the professional hate-mongers of the far-right, always ready to supply malign and practically useless myths of 'belonging', to replace more progressive and effective forms of solidarity. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, and again after the Depression of the 1930s, it was the power of organised labour, and its emergent political wing in the Labour party and the US Democrats, that eventually provided a progressive counter-force in society, demanding a more just and sustainable future. Green-democratic revolution Today, though, the ideological chaos and evident confusion of the Starmer government suggests that that powerful progressive alliance no longer exists in any meaningful form; and that any positive moves the UK Government makes, in terms of workers' rights or public spending, may well be undermined by their lack of of any new macroeconomic strategy, and their weirdly uncritical addiction to the idea of 'growth', at any price.
