Disrespectful 19 year old assaults defenceless grandmother by Dr E V Rapiti, Cape Town June 7, 2024.

[Nat Quinn]

Disrespectful 19 year old assaults defenceless grandmother by Dr E V Rapiti, Cape Town June 7, 2024.

The assault of an elderly defenseless grandmother by her 19 year old grandson, captured on video and now gone viral is a damning commentary of the fear that parents and grandparents live with, daily, in this country. This has been going on for probably the last fifty years where the elderly have become the punching bags of our country’s aggressive disrespectful youth.
I listened to the two experts, Prof Saths Cooper,  and family therapist, minister Buqa, on a TV station, and both of them emphasised  what a violent society we have been for several generations. We rank amongst the top most violent countries in the world when it comes to homicide, rape and gender based violence.

The two guests harped on the lack of family values and the lack of parental care as the major cause for the elder abuse but neither made any mention of the role of substances like amphetamine, heroin, alcohol and cannabis as the major cause for elder abuse, family violence, family breakdown, homicide, gangsterism and gender violence.
This video of the  shocking incident is merely the tip of the iceberg. The total lack of respect by this young man in the video was blood curdling and was enough to arouse the emotions and attention of the public and media because it was captured on video and made viral.

There are Hundreds of thousands of families that have been and are being abused in this country daily but only the few that are captured on video make the headlines; the rest are unseen and unheard of, so it explains why we are not serious about family abuse in this country.

I have been an ardent advocate for the education of our children at an early age about the dangers of drugs. I approached the Western Cape education department about 15 years ago and the response I received from the CEO was most discouraging.
I mentioned it to Hellen Zille, when she was the incumbent premier of the Cape on a radio show and she promised to look into to setting up low cost halfway houses. Nothing came of that. The western Cape government then set up drug support groups using the expensive American based Matrix program which really didn’t do much to address the problem.
I requested the help of the provincial MEC for health, Dr French and the minister of social services, My Albert Fritz when I was president of the medical association in the western Cape.
Both agreed to offer me assistance to spearhead a plan to help substance users and their families.

I presented a plan to deal with drug addiction to  the western Cape’s spokesperson for health, Dr CLOETE. He listened to me rather dispassionately for an hour in his offices and ended the meeting by offering to connect me with someone senior from the department of social services. I never heard from anyone after that meeting.

I ran a support group meeting in Mitchells Plain to assist the community to deal with addiction in their homes for over fifteen years in the hope of setting up several self-help groups, using my simple 4 Steps program.
One of the major hurdles we faced was to find suitable venues to hold these meetings. We couldn’t afford to pay schools for the use of their rooms so the schools rented their rooms to church organisations.
The community was too preoccupied with their own issues to give off their time to run these meetings so the only group we ran in Westridge high school had to close down abruptly.

Fortunately there are a few elderly people still running their own support groups using my program but they are not getting the media exposure that they deserve to expand and flourish.

The media only looks for major catastrophies like murder and elder abuse because of their sensational nature.
I have approached several community, religious and commercial radio stations to give drug addiction and its management some exposure but none of them were truly interested.

I was invited as a guest on Cape Talk to talk about my program by an announcer, whom I gathered was a member of the AA so she became extremely rude and abrupt with me when I expressed the limitations of the AAs program when it comes to helping the semi-literate communities. This announcer was so irate with me that she rudely cut me off  to the utter annoyance of listeners who called the station to complain about her rudeness.

I never received an apology from the station nor the producer who contacted me for the interview. I lost all respect for this station ever since.

I fear, once people get tired of this incident of the young man assaulting his grandmother, everything will be forgotten, which is a great pity because there are simple solutions that we can apply to make a dent in the spiralling problem of drug addiction and all the violence related to it.

It’s not an easy problem to solve but that’s not a reason for us not do something about it.
Anyone from the government, law enforcement, the education department, the media and from religious organisations that are willing to discuss the solutions with me, is most welcome to contact me. Society has been crying out for help for a very long time but, sadly, their cries have been falling on deaf ears for far too long.

Dr E V Rapiti
Mitchell’s Plain
Cape Town
July 7, 2024
Dr Rapiti is a family doctor practicing in Mitchells Plain for over 42 years with a special interest in addiction and addiction counseling.

He is the author of the self-help book, “4 Steps 2 Healing” aimed at helping substance users and their families to cope with the baffling problem of addiction. The book is available from his rooms and from exclusive books.

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