The effect of absent fathers on today's youth.

 Disclaimer!! This blog is my personal reflection report from a conference at UJ COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DFC AND APB!!

As the statistics of gender-based violence increase in South Africa, many questions tend to rise beyond that as to what could be the influence behind all this terror? Everyday our sisters and mothers are being raped and killed out there at the costs of finding men behind this. 

The question that touched me most was is it because of the absent father on the boy child? It's when I came to realise that many males make it a reason that they do all their abusive stuff because they didn't grow with their fathers or didn't have a father figure. On my perspective view, yes, the father's absence can drive a boy child to be reckless, a boy needs a father who is a man to tach how to be one. Growing up as a boy you encounter so many challenges of which some needs someone who have been there to guide you how to do it.

As men, the points like this are not to make us change as we can't actually change with no time, but they are here to make us aware of the lifestyles we're living, not every male can be a man. How to actually change it, they say change comes from within and starts by you, as a young man a question to my brothers is, do we actually want our children to live the same way we did, face everything we did? No, that's not how our societies should be, there's a quote by Martin Sweets which says, "A man is a man when he leaves and promise to come back and does so". 

If our societies need to be places safe for our daughters and sisters it shouldn’t be only because we are there to protect them, but because we have educated our boys to be men. If a boy child is educated to love and to take care of the sister, there won't be any need to protect the girl child because a boy child will be educated to love. 

A lot of males tend to say it's because of my father whom I don't know, it’s time where one should say I want to do better than him, I want to be present for my children and teach them how to love. We tend to say we hate what our fathers did to us and our mothers, but the main reason behind it, we hate our fathers not their actions, when we hate our fathers we hate male hood, when we hate male hood, we hate ourselves that's why most of us fail to do better than them but take it as a courage to do more like they did. 

All behind this is to encourage us to learn to forgive, forgiveness is what we need to heal, to do better, if we can't forgive, we hate and moreover we turn into hating ourselves.