Rough Aunties is a shocking and moving documentary about Bobbi Bear, a group of women in South Africa who aggressively aid the needs of abused and molested children who would otherwise suffer in silence. A real heartbreaker.
The film opens with a seriously traumatized young girl struggling to tell Rough Auntie Mildred Ngcobo, nicknamed Sbo, what has happened to her. The Bobbi Bear worker acknowledges that it is difficult to talk about ‘private parts’ openly and hands her a bright yellow teddy bear. She gently suggests that the child relates her story by marking the bear with a magic marker, an elastic band and band-aids. We learn the girl’s horrifying story, ‘He broke into my house by smashing a window, then he got me by the throat’ she says, before revealing that 'he' raped her.
The Rough Aunties swing into action as they and the police swoop onto the home of the rapist, the girl’s neighbour. The man’s mother denies her son’s involvement and adds insult to injury. ‘Didn’t that girl’s father do it to her first? Why didn’t you arrest him?’ Sbo angrily challenges her: ‘You don’t talk like a parent, old woman’. A policeman silences the old woman and warns her sternly: ‘Shut up or you’ll be arrested.’
Such is a typical day of a Bobbi Bear worker saving children from their aggressors that is not always men. One case involves a woman who receives a five-year prison sentence for incredulously shoving a pipe up inside her child’s vagina. But the circumstances come in many different forms. A man is shot dead in his home, in front of his wife and children; another woman loses her own young son in a drowning accident where a river has been illegally mined for mud.
Passionate about what they are doing, they are persistent and not afraid of getting their hands dirty in order to help others. There is also a man in the group, the classic burly South African policeman who is clearly as moved by the cases, as much as the women he assists.
Some of the workers are victims themselves, and use their experiences in order to help their young charges. One young woman is so traumatized she has trouble distinguishing between the men in her house and identifying who raped her. Thuli Sibiya patiently gets to the bottom of it. It turns out that the perpetrator is her own grandfather who has since fled the home.
‘People in our community, most of the time, they don’t talk about it,’ says Thuli. ‘[In the] Zulu nation, a little child cannot say the, the child has to go around the word, just give you an outline of what she wants to say.’
The Rough Aunties live by one rule, summed by the group’s founder Jackie Branfield, who started the organization on a shoestring and is not adverse to taking victims into her home. ‘The day you all stop crying for these children, pack your bags and go build jigsaw puzzles at the old age home, because then you’ve lost your heart. Don’t ever stop crying.’
Rough Aunties is both frank and sensitive. Highly recommended.
