From dreams to action — Lucinda Evans champions child safety and empowerment in SA

Daily Maverick

06-06-2025

Lucinda Evans, feminist activist and founder of the Cape Town non-profit organisation Philisa Abafazi Bethu, is in the business of defending and empowering survivors of abuse. Her dream is a world in which children, women, men and members of the LGBTQIA+ community can live in peace and safety.
'I think for us, we're still dreaming the big dream. Some people, they motivate you by saying, 'Your dream must be so big, it scares you'. It scares me daily… I work with people's lives every day. I work with hearts. I work with souls. I work with trauma, and I work in a space of genocide — I have owned that word, that GBV (gender-based-violence) is the genocide in South Africa.'
These were the words of Lucinda Evans, feminist activist and founder of Philisa Abafazi Bethu, a non-profit organisation in Cape Town that aims to protect and empower abused women, children and LGBTQIA+ individuals.
When Evans started Philisa Abafazi Bethu in 2008, she ran it out of the dining room and garage of her home in Lavender Hill, opening her first safehouse in her backyard.
More than 15 years later, the organisation has grown beyond her wildest expectations, with the Philisa Abafazi Bethu Women and Family Centre established in Retreat, and three safehouses serving abused women in need of emergency shelter, members of the LGBTQIA+ community and children facing acute trauma, respectively.
Evans decided to found her organisation after witnessing a man beating up his girlfriend on her street. Though there were other people standing around, no one stepped in to help her. Evans intervened by knocking the man with the mirror of her car, and when she was told the situation was none of her business, said: 'I'm making it my business.'
'My business is that of a human rights defender, a defender of children and women. It includes the LGBTQIA+ (community), now. It also includes men,' she told Daily Maverick.
'Mopping the sea'
Evans said that while she had seen the difference Philisa Abafazi Bethu made in the lives of children and families, in wider society 'nothing much has changed' when it came to protections for children.
'We find that South Africa has become even worse when it comes to protection of children,' she said.
She referenced the *Cwecwe case, which involved the alleged rape of a seven-year-old girl from the Eastern Cape town of Matatiele. The matter has yet to be taken on for prosecution by the National Prosecuting Authority due to 'insufficient evidence' in the case docket originally presented by the police.
'The Cwecwe case represents every single child in this country that has been sexually violated where there is no proof, or the case goes to court and the child is not able to give chronological, factual information,' said Evans.
'Children don't have that capacity… to speak chronologically, and so most of the time these cases are thrown out. Where does it leave the child? What does the child become? What is the trauma?'
Evans called on the 'custodians of child protection', including the Commissioner for Children in the Western Cape and the National Department of Social Development, to step up efforts to provide protection for children.
'You are… mopping the sea at the moment, when it comes to children… Because… I cannot see, as an activist, where the inroads, the apex points of intervention are,' said Evans.
New approaches to child protection
In November 2024, Philisa Abafazi Bethu opened an emergency safehouse for children, designed to provide short-term intervention for victims in acute cases of abuse, rape or molestation who had nowhere else to go.
'I work with social workers directly. My team was screened and vetted. We give you seven days… to trace a parent, to get another family member involved, (and space for) the child to recuperate… You have an option, you have a bed — everything is in place,' said Evans.
However, the organisations has struggled to get state support for the programme, as the established child protection system doesn't recognise emergency safehouses for children.
Another project Evans is aiming to launch in November is an early childhood development (ECD) centre for children who have experienced violence.
'There would be an intervention programme that would help children defuse themselves, through art therapy, through music, through all the therapies tailored for a child,' she said.
Evans noted that the period between the ages of zero and five was critical for a child's learning, meaning that very young children who experienced trauma should have access to interventions as early as possible.
'The education system isn't built for an educator to pick up on these things, because there are outputs; there is a syllabus; there are timelines for when children need to know things… I want to pilot this ECD centre as a therapeutic space in which we build all of these things already for a child,' she said.
'The (child's) nervous system would have a better chance in a Grade One class versus at the moment, where schools are suspending and expelling Grade One learners for displaying violence and bullying, but nobody sits anybody down and looks at intimate partner violence in the home.'
Looking ahead
Child protection starts within homes and families, according to Evans. She called on ordinary South Africans to be proactive in reporting abuse of children within their communities, and condemned instances in which people protected perpetrators.
Evans said: 'What keeps me going… is still the dream that one day all of us can just live in peace. As a child, to be able to play in the street and nobody grabs you and hurts you and rapes you. For parents to be able to parent their child in whichever way parenting positively happens.
'And for spaces to be available for parents who are not able to manage, so they can go to a place that can help them, journey with them… I'm dreaming of a place where men and their nervous systems can be calm and violence-free.' DM