Choose Love

On the 5th of February CityPres reported a sickening atrocity: "A group of boys from an agricultural high school in the Northern Cape made a video of themselves brutalising a black pupil and sodomising" [more correctly gang-raping] "him with a broom handle...The four-minute video shows the victim bound by his hands and feet to a steel framed bed. His assailants paint him with a white substance which appears to be the consistency of shaving cream, while a handful of black pupils watch....The boy can be heard screaming and crying as his attackers and other boys in the room laugh and joke. The child is apparently a new pupil at the school, having only enrolled there at the beginning of the year." Everyone who reads this story is sickened, as well they should be. No child should EVER go through this, and any child who does should 1) have access to the most professional counselling money can buy a few times a week for at least a few years, and 2) be able to afford to choose change schools if he wishes to so that he never has to spend another second in the environment where other children who brutalised and humiliated him - preferably a really high quality, really safe school, that will give the child the best chance money can buy of a really fanatsic future.  So we thought we'd try and turn our rage at what happened into a campaign to help fund an initiative to give the victim of this horrific incident the chance he deserves in life, and in the process, hopefully let him know that not everone is evil - random strangers he has never met care, and there is some basis for at some point beginning to rebuild some sense of safety and security and the ability to trust others. In the words of Edmund Burke "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Let's not do nothing this time.