Despite Women’s Month and the 16 days of activism, SA’s gender-based violence (GBV) rates are increasing and the country has the highest number of reported rapes in the world. It is clear a new approach is needed.
SA had one of the best national gender machineries globally, says Amanda Gouws, professor of political science and chair of the SA Research Initiative in Gender Politics at Stellenbosch University, writing in The Conversation.
“It had structures in the legislature — such as the joint monitoring committee on the quality of life and the status of women, and the multiparty women’s caucus in the executive (office of the status of women) and the independent constitutional body, the Commission for Gender Equality.
“Most of these structures were dismantled and replaced with a dysfunctional ministry for women, youth and people with disabilities that is supposed to initiate interventions on gender-based violence, Gouws says.
In 2020 President Cyril Ramaphosa declared GBV “a second pandemic”, and the social development department’s Gender-Based Violence Command Centre received calls from 120,000 victims in the first three months of lockdown. Clearly, the Domestic Violence Act in itself has not deterred male violence against women.
“Ours, is, an incompetent, corrupt, ineffective, beleaguered, unstable, but also relatively young state,” says Kopano Ratele, professor of psychology at Stellenbosch University and author of the book Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity.
“A more mature and settled state, one where corruption was low, and there were fewer problems to contend with and, very importantly, where the lines between expert knowledge and policy-making, policy implementation and evaluation are closely tied in a feedback loop, would be in a better position to control the violence,” Ratele says.
As the state fails at several levels of service delivery, women, children and other groups that are vulnerable to physical violence increasingly become victims. Researchers point to the systemic origins of a society rooted in inequality and oppression.
No single factor can explain this violence in any society, “myriad factors contribute, and their interplay lies at the root of the scourge”, says Gouws. “Across the country, the problem of GBV and femicide is structural and fuelled by inequalities that transect race, class, gender, sexuality and age. It is prevalent throughout the life-cycle stages for women — from infancy, girlhood, adolescence and adulthood. The economic costs for the country have been huge.”
Prof Indiran Govender, head of the department at family medicine and primary healthcare at Dr George Mukhari Academic Hospital & Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University concurs: “Gender inequality, poverty, unemployment, alcohol and drugs are the most common reasons for GBV.”
In his study Gender-based Violence — An increasing epidemic in South Africa, Govender says GBV “is deeply ingrained in homes, workplaces, cultures and traditions”.
The rates of violence against women in this country are very deeply connected to inequalities.
— Kopano Ratele, professor of psychology at Stellenbosch University
The statistics remain shocking: one woman is raped every three hours in SA, with 10,818 rape cases reported in the first quarter of 2022. The rate at which women are killed by intimate partners in SA is five times higher than the global average.
Compounding the problem is that many people living in SA have limited access to formal psychosocial or medical support, “contributing to psychological trauma and behavioural consequences with an inability to reintegrate into society”, says Govender.
SA is subject to an “inequalities complex”, says Ratele. “The rates of violence against women in this country are very deeply connected to inequalities. It is not only the rates of violence. It is also its gratuitousness, its apparent casualness. It is the feeling and fact that the state cannot control it.
“Studies show that the more economically unequal a society the higher the levels of violence. The unequal geographical patterning is another form of inequality that nurtures the overall rates of violence, because we have massed poor people into economic reserves. A closer look at the police data confirms this. Certain police districts have higher rates of violence precisely because these are areas that are more economically deprived relative to those areas that are economically affluent.
“And then there is the legacy of white, systemic racism. You take these four kinds of inequalities, and there are others, and you can begin to imagine, and you can see in studies, how violence is most acute where the forms of inequality are more tightly knit. The inequalities complex that characterises SA is, then, a key driver of rates of violence,” Ratele says.
The solution lies in looking beyond policing and courts. As Govender says: “In SA, culture and identity play a big role in violence against women. Women are expected to be subservient to men and men view women as their property to do what they please with. This is reinforced by men showing off their masculinity and their power to other men. It is a way for men to maintain power and control over women which is often linked to alcohol and drug abuse. Male children are brought up to believe women are below them and must carry out all their wishes.
“Many women are economically deprived, which begins with their fathers. Their dependence on men for all their financial needs and for men to make important decisions disempowers women and reduces their self-confidence.”
The gains made by feminism are lost on many in SA, with many women still expected to take responsibility for domestic issues. “They are sometimes not even allowed to leave the home alone or further their studies. When women do not have the same rights and opportunities as men, they are at a risk for violence based solely on their gender,” Govender says.
The various state interventions fail because they do not address the psychosocial causes, says Gouws, whose research shows that “to change male violent behaviour towards females, there is a need to focus on changing male thought patterns that drive gender-based violence and femicide”.
“For instance, seeing females as ‘properties’ can produce an entitlement mentality among males. This makes it difficult for them to let females live in peace when they end romantic or marital relationships. It is the feeling of ‘ownership’ that gives males the audacity to want to keep controlling and brutalising females they are no longer involved with. Therefore, to change and possibly eradicate male violence against women in SA, intervention efforts must be targeted at changing how males see females.”
‘Changing perceptions’
However, changing perceptions cannot be legislated, says Gouws. “This perhaps explains why a legalistic or policy approach alone is not cutting it. Changing perceptions to change behaviour, which usually occurs at the private and personal levels of gender relations, will require specific interventions aimed at re-socialising boys and men.”
Some of these include changing the school curriculum “to place women alongside men in history and social studies. Co-parenting from birth to break the backbone of patriarchy is another possible long-term strategy in this regard”.
Ratele says all societies “are shaped by their underlying incentives, a reward system found in a vision of itself, permeating its institutions, policies, programmes, and scaffolded by a reward structure”.
“The major religions of the world know this. Some governments also get this. Some societies do this. Do it over and over again. And then some more. Reward them.
“If you are a government, remind people, practically so, what is it you expect from them. Reinforce the expected behaviour. The lesson and reinforcement must be repeated on a daily basis, in buses, taxis, trains, television and streets until it comes habitual. Don’t just wag your finger at them, like our government ministers tend to do. To just come after the violence has happened and pick up the injured and dead bodies is not a solution.”
Where the state fails to act, there are global forces that may effect the changes needed. “GBV is recognised by the World Health Organisation as a major public health problem. Not only is it a direct cause of injury, morbidity and death, but women’s health is affected indirectly through unwanted pregnancies and accompanying health risks, as well as mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and AIDS,” Govender says.
“We as family physicians and the medical profession need to place more emphasis on teaching, training new doctors to be aware of this global epidemic and manage this scourge effectively. We also need to be more involved in community awareness programmes and empower communities to manage this... We need to advocate at schools and universities to include managing, reporting and documenting GBV in our curriculum. The repercussions of GBV will be felt by our future generations as GBV has long-lasting mental and physical consequences and becomes a vicious cycle of abuse.”
Gouws says research shows that the most important cog in the struggle against GBV is a strong women’s movement. “In SA there is currently no coherent, active women’s or feminist movement. The Women’s National Coalition that spearheaded feminist equality during the democratic transition in the 1990s has since fractured and disintegrated.
“Activism now takes the form of sporadic issue-driven action, such as the campaigns by TotalShutDown and EndRapeCulture. While this type of activism is laudable, it does not sustain pressure on government for action.”
And maybe we need to reimagine Women’s Month.
Ratele says: “We seem to be trapped in thinking of it as a month in which we are trying achieve the basic need of safety for women. We do not think of Women’s Month in the way one might imagine a science festival or art biennale. We seem to be trapped in a basic-needs political dystopia.
“Women’s Month could be a time where people go out till late into the night (because they are safe and there is affordable, quality public transport) to listen to book readings and watch performances, readings by people of all genders. I imagine a month where there are entrancing and informative activities... It’s month where there is art everywhere, where science labs dazzle, and where there are festivals of amateur sports games.”
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