The wings hit first — a blur of brown and fury cutting through the still afternoon. Claws flailed. Feathers flew. A mother hen exploded from the ground, charging straight at me like a missile on fire.
I stood there, three years old, arms outstretched, lips puckered in welcome. She must be happy to see me, I thought.
She wasn’t.
Her beak met my mouth. Her claws knocked me backwards. Dust swallowed me. I screamed. Somewhere behind me, Gogo dropped her firewood and ran.
She scooped me up from the soil — a weeping, confused bundle of limbs and snot and fear.
No one had warned me not to walk up to a mother hen guarding her chicks. No one was there to explain that her rage wasn’t personal — it was protective. That job belonged to a father. But he wasn’t around. My mother was out working. Gogo was doing her best, but she was tired, older, stretched thin between chores and childcare.
I was alone, and I didn’t even know it.
That hen, in hindsight, wasn’t just an angry bird. She was something bigger. She was the GBV movement — fierce, focused, fighting for survival.
The chick she shielded? That was the girl child — vulnerable, precious, hunted.
And me? I was the boy in the dust — wide-eyed, open-hearted, utterly unprepared for the violence I was walking into.
Deepening, not diluting, the GBV narrative
This is not a rebuke of the gender-based violence (GBV) movement. It’s a call to deepen it — to broaden our lens, not blur it.
South Africa’s epidemic of violence against women and girls demands fierce urgency. That must remain. But in our race to shield the chick, we’ve forgotten the other child in the yard — the boy in the dust.
He’s not more important. But he is dangerously overlooked. Because unattended boys often become untethered men. And untethered men break homes, become headlines and fill prisons.
What we tell boys isn’t enough
For years, our national message to boys has sounded like a list of restrictions: Don’t hit. Don’t rape. Don’t harass.
All true. All vital.
But when you raise boys only on what not to do, you don’t form men. You create a vacuum. And nature — especially human nature — hates a vacuum.
Experts are sounding the alarm. Psychologist Jordan Peterson puts it plainly: “The problem with most masculinity discourse is that it tells young men what not to be — but rarely what they could become.”
As feminist journalist Liz Plank observed: “If you’re told that you’re not allowed to feel emotion, you are going to grow up not being able to manage your emotions. And… if we are not also emphasising how to have a plan for boys and men in our society, then all of the advancement towards women can actually become counterproductive.”
South Africa’s own Sonke Gender Justice echoes this insight. Boys need more than awareness. They need identity. Direction. Belonging.
A 2021 Unicef report drives the point home: “Interventions that help boys develop a sense of meaning, purpose, and prosocial identity show greater long-term reduction in violent behaviour than punitive or reactive models.”
Don’t just tell him what not to be. Show him what he’s for. How to protect, not control. How to lead without lording. How to carry strength with tenderness, not tyranny.
What apartheid broke, we must rebuild
To understand the fractured masculinity we see today, look back at what apartheid wrought:
- The migrant labour system that made fathers strangers in their own homes;
- Pass laws that turned black male presence into criminality; and
- Political exile and imprisonment that removed community mentors and moral anchors.
Entire generations of black boys were raised amid silence and absence. Mothers held the line. Grandmothers held the house. But they were never meant to hold it alone.
We — the boys — grew up shaped by strong women and haunted by missing men. Masculinity, for us, became something we guessed at. We pieced it together from pride, pain, muscle and music videos.
The cost of unattended boys
The numbers are chilling:
- More than 80% of murder victims in South Africa are men;
- Men are five times more likely to die by suicide;
- Male victims of abuse rarely report this, and have almost nowhere to go;
- Fewer than five government shelters exist for abused men; and
- 43% of children live with their mothers only, while just 4% live with their fathers only (Stats SA, 2021).
These aren’t counters to women’s suffering — they’re signals of a parallel crisis. One that feeds the other. You cannot stop gender-based violence if you don’t stop its supply chain. And too often, the supplier is pain passed down, unhealed and unnamed.
The bias that begins at home
Even when fathers want to be present, the system too often shuts them out.
South African custody law, though officially gender-neutral, continues to favour maternal custody by default. In a 2020 survey by Fathers 4 Justice SA, more than 70% of separated fathers reported feeling systematically excluded from their children’s lives, despite fighting for shared custody.
The message? A father is optional. But the data says otherwise.
Research from the University of the Free State shows that involved fatherhood — even post-divorce — significantly reduces rates of substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, school dropout, and violent behaviour among boys.
If we’re serious about preventing GBV, we must stop treating fatherhood as a luxury.
I was that boy
I wore my trauma like a school satchel. Laughed it off. Drank it down. Covered it with ambition and designer blazers.
But no title can father a child. No salary can calm a storm you inherited in silence. No performance can fill the absence of a man you never knew how to become.
For me, it took a hijacking, a broken marriage and a psychiatric collapse to finally face the boy in the dust.
Most men never do.
They bleed quietly — until they explode.
Justice needs a wider lens
We’re making a mistake when we frame men only as monsters and women only as victims.
Yes, many women are victims. But many perpetrators were once boys in pain.
The cycle begins long before fists fly.
And if we want justice, we have to see both ends of the chain — the wound and the weapon.
Because unattended trauma always finds a voice.
Because broken boys don’t grow up — they just grow dangerous.
So let the mother hen fight. Let her shield the vulnerable and scream as loud as the moment demands. But while she defends the chick, someone must kneel down and lift the boy in the dust — before he returns, not with arms outstretched, but with fists clenched.
What we must do
This is not just a parenting issue. It’s a national crisis with policy implications.
Here’s what we must begin to implement — urgently and intentionally:
- Equip boys with emotional literacy and identity formation, not just discipline;
- Build fatherhood training and re-entry programmes for absentee and returning dads;
- Fund shelters and mental health support systems for boys and men;
- Establish mentorship pipelines in schools, churches and sports academies; and
- Reform family court practice to encourage shared parenting and involved fatherhood.
Final word: It takes a village
We cannot keep asking mothers and gogos to raise boys into whole men alone. We cannot heal a nation by shielding only its daughters. We must also shape its sons.
Because it takes more than a mother hen. It takes a village.
Let’s build one — brick by brick, boy by boy. DM