So
what are we do to? Allow me to digress for a moment to tell some of
my own stories. These stories (all of them really happened) will give
you an insight into some of my own experiences over the years, to put
my thoughts on the matter into context. I have deliberately excluded
any mention of race as I do not want the matter of race to cloud the
issue. Suffice it to say that the stories I tell are of people of all
races. These stories are a small sample of the situations I have
dealt with or have been involved with over the years.
MY STORIES
My
first experience of violence against women was as a preschool child.
We lived in a typical middle class white suburb. One evening after my
bedtime I was awakened to the sounds of a woman calling for help. The
woman was our neighbour across the road who was being beaten by her
husband. I heard my mother urging my father to “do something.” My
father was a big, strapping and physically strong man who believed
that a man was never to lift his hands to a woman. He duly went
across the road and I assume sorted out the abusive husband with his
fists. The next day there was a policeman at the door and a few days
after that I saw my father wearing a suit for the first time in my
life on his way to court. The man across the road had laid a charge
of assault against my father and the star witness in the case was the
very woman who had called for help. The presiding magistrate threw
the case out of court and my father was a free man. The next time the
woman across the road called for help, my parents pretended not to
hear.
Then
there was the young, newly married woman whom I was asked to go and
see after her husband had beaten her. She met me at the door. Both
eyes were swollen shut and she was badly bruised. The husband fearing
that she might take flight, had locked all they owned (including the
curtains) in one of the bedrooms and had taken the key with him to
work. He did however leave the dirty laundry and some washing powder
in the bathroom so that she could do the washing while he was at
work. When I arrived she was busy washing clothes by hand in the
bath. We stood in the empty lounge and the walls echoed as she told
how he had beaten her the night before during an argument. She told
me she was desperate to leave to go to her mother, that she did not
want to lay a charge, that she just wanted to leave and put it all
behind her. To cut a long story short, I helped her to retrieve her
possessions and arranged a lift for her to her mother. Three weeks
later she was back, seemingly happier than ever, holding her
husband's hand and looking him adoringly in the eye. I was accused of
trying to break up their home and their marriage.
Then
there was the Saturday afternoon I was called to the home of a couple
who were involved in a domestic dispute. I arrived at the time the
husband was shouting and throwing glasses and crockery at his wife.
There were shards of glass all over the place and there was blood
everywhere from the cuts he had sustained on his own feet as he was
barefoot at the time. I managed to calm the situation and
subsequently became involved at a therapeutic level with this couple.
It emerged in the sessions that the husband regularly abused his
wife. His favourite form of abuse was to push his wife's head into
the toilet bowl and then to flush. She was adamant that she would
never leave him because, in her words, “I love him too much.” We
could not move further than that no matter how hard I tried. I was
flummoxed, felt I had hit an impasse, decided to terminate my
intervention and to refer them to someone else. They never attended
any appointments with the therapist to whom I had made the referral.
Then
there was the evening I was called out to a domestic dispute
involving a gun. I arrived to find the husband sitting at the dining
room table, his pistol lying on the table next to him and his wife
lovingly serving him supper. Apart from the gun on the table,
everything seemed to be normal. They tried to reassure me that they
had had a small misunderstanding but that all had been settled.
Luckily the astute military policeman I had taken along with me had
been doing some investigating of his own while I was talking to the
couple, and the truth soon emerged. Earlier in the evening there had
been an argument between him and his wife. Their three daughters aged
16, 12 and 8 became involved in the argument and that is when he
produced his pistol threatening to shoot those who dissented. It was
at that point that the eldest daughter, in fear of her own life and
those of her sisters, bundled her sisters into the family vehicle and
drove off to safety. He had stood in the road firing shots at the
fleeing vehicle but miraculously, nobody was hurt. I eventually, with
the help of the policeman, found the children and listened to their
side of the story. I will never forget the beautiful 8 year old girl
telling me with innocent wide-eyed amazement that, “Uncle! I saw
the flame coming out of the gun!” The wife refused to corroborate
any of what the children had said and would not allow them to make
any formal statements. She insisted that there had been a “small
misunderstanding,” that all had been resolved, and refused to make
a formal statement of her own. To cut a very long story short, I had
the children removed into foster care that evening, which was
ratified in court the next morning. He was charged for the discharge
of a firearm in public and had his gun licence revoked. There were a
few subsequent incidents to this one with this couple but I should
probably save those stories for my memoirs!
Then
there was the morning I was called out to the casualty department at
the hospital. They had admitted and were treating a female rape
victim. She was a young, newly married woman. Her husband was away on
deployment and had asked his best friend to look after his wife while
he was away. This best friend had arrived at the home of the woman
the previous evening with a take-away meal and some bottles of
alcohol. They had enjoyed the meal together and had drunk a lot of
alcohol. She passed out from the excessive alcohol. She remembered
waking up in a daze with the man on top of her pushing himself into
her. She asked him to stop and tried to push him off but could not.
After he left she called one of her friends who brought her to the
hospital. She was in shock and was displaying all the typical signs
of having been raped. The doctor treating her was thorough. He spent
the best part of three hours conducting his examination and compiling
the rape kit. She was adamant that she wanted to press charges
against the man who had raped her. To cut another long story short,
the case never made it to court. There were no visible signs of rape
or of a struggle. The man said the sex was consensual and there was
nothing except her word to prove otherwise.
Then
there was the man living in the room next to me on one of my
deployments. He was having a relationship with one of the female
members and was entertaining her in his room in the evenings. One
evening I woke up to noises that I recognised as someone being
assaulted. When I was fully awake there was only the sound of voices
– two people talking in the room next door. The next day I asked
the woman if she had been assaulted, but she denied it. About a week
after that, once more I was awoken to the same noise. This time
however, the woman came out of the room running away from the man
screaming. He made no attempt to follow her and she later refused to
lay a complaint against the man but she did cut all ties with the
man. It could not have been more than two evenings after this
incident that there was another woman knocking at his door. I
overheard her telling him how much she admired him and how strong he
was and that she had fallen in love with him the first day she had
seen him. Needless to say, the pattern soon repeated itself. A week
or so later I heard noises of her too being beaten followed by the
sound of voices talking. A week or so after that there was
pandemonium one evening when he assaulted her again and locked the
door to prevent her from leaving. She screamed for help, people
arrived to intervene and she was removed from the room so badly hurt
that she could not walk. He was subsequently arrested by the military
police and charged with assault with the intent to do grievous bodily
harm. She was examined by the district surgeon and made a statement.
To cut this long story short, she later recanted her statement, they
were both sent back home and shortly thereafter they were married!
The case against him is still pending but the chances are very
slender that anything will come of it.
I
will tell one last story just to confuse the issue a little and to
demonstrate how complex this issue really gets.
Then
there was the young couple who had come to see me to seek help with
their relationship. There were problems with communication and issues
regarding gender roles in the relationship. After three sessions with
the couple I could not understand what the problem was – it seemed
to me we were going around in circles and weren't making any headway
at all. One evening as I was falling asleep it struck me like a bolt
of lightning. I had not been able to understand what was happening
because I was looking at the situation from the perspective of my own
preconceptions and prejudices. The next morning I asked the man to
come and see me in my office. I asked him this question: “Is she
hitting you?” The tears welled up in his eyes. I asked him to lift
up his shirt for me. He wept tears of shame as he showed me the
bruises. She used to beat him with a hockey stick – he was black
and blue. He had never retaliated and his shame kept him from telling
anyone. To cut this long story short, once the dark secret was out,
the marriage disintegrated and they were divorced shortly thereafter.
THE
ISSUE AT HAND
Let
us however get back to the issue of violence against women. What can
we do? How can we even begin to address the issue? How can I make a
real and a meaningful difference? In each of the stories I have told
I have felt helpless to do anything more than to stand on the
sidelines and watch how things get worse. I must confess I have
developed a high tolerance for the violence and abuse against women I
see and hear about. There is very little that can shock me and that
makes me feel guilty and even somehow complicit.
I
support the efforts being made at the judicial level to establish
special courts and to prioritise gender based violence cases. I
support the efforts being made by the SAPS to train officers to
handle such cases. These efforts however, laudable as they are, I do
not believe are going to solve the problem. We may argue that prompt
and efficient justice will act as a deterrent to those contemplating
acts of violence against women, but that argument falls flat on the
basis of evidence that not even the death penalty offers any
deterrence against crime. We need to get to the root causes or else
we will simply be treating the symptoms and not solving the problem.
I
do not find it helpful either to conflate the issue of violence
against women as told in the stories above, with the issue of the
brutal rapes and murders of those such as Anene Booysen. They are
perhaps two sides of the same coin but I find it difficult and
confusing to deal with the two issues together. Surely the dynamics
and the drivers of these two issues are different? The rape and
murder of Anene Booysen has the dynamics of poor education,
unemployment, drug abuse, frustration, hopelessness and men
emasculated by their circumstances brutally trying to assert
themselves and take out their frustrations violently on their victim.
The stories I have told above do have some of those elements but to
me are not in the same category as Anene Booysen's gang-rape and
murder. I would like to talk about the violence against women we see
in our own lives and in the lives of those around us that we see
every day – the acts of violence that we become accustomed to and
live with. To talk about both issues at the same time seems to me to
provide an easy way of projecting the issue away from ourselves and
in that way to escape any guilt or culpability. It's easy to say I'm
not a brutal rapist but not as easy to say that I am not guilty of
the other forms of violence against women or the prejudice that leads
to the violence against women.
Violence
against women has many shapes and forms, it is not just physical
violence. The abuse may be verbal where the man asserts his power
over the woman with words. This in turn leads to emotional abuse
where the woman's sense of self-worth is attacked and she is made to
feel less than human. There is economic abuse where the woman is
economically dependent on the man and where the man uses that power
to assert himself in such a way that the woman feels she has no
choice but to submit herself to the man's will and whims. In a
landmark study conducted in Cape Town in 1999, the Medical Research
Council (MRC) found that 43.6% of the men interviewed had in the past
ten years abused women. Of these who admitted abuse, emotional abuse
was the most common at 90.3% followed by verbal abuse at 82.9%,
physical abuse at 41.4%, economic abuse at 24.7% and sexual abuse at
9.2%.I The interesting part of the study concerns the reasons given for the
conflict between men and women. The major factors that caused
conflict were when the man felt his position and authority in the
home were being threatened. Abuse was very likely if the woman “sat
on his head” or “spoke back” or if the man suspected the woman
of having affairs with other men. I concede it is wrong to use this
study to generalise to the South African general population in 2013,
but it does give us a good idea of the patterns of abuse in men's
relationships with women.
So
what can we do? How can we turn this terrible blight on us as a
nation around? I think there are two areas that we need to address as
a starting point: the issue of patriarchy and gender roles, and the
issue of violence as a way to solve our conflicts. We need to start
somewhere and we need to do this together. There have been campaigns
that target women and there have been campaigns that target men, but
I think the time has come for us to be talking about these issues
together as men and women in our homes, our schools and educational
institutions, our workplaces, our communities and in our various
organisations.
PATRIARCHY
& GENDER ROLES
We
live in a deeply patriarchal society. I grew up in a home where my
father was the person who took decisions regarding the home and where
my mother was the one who cared for the children, cooked the meals
and kept the home tidy. We find this patriarchy across all races and
cultures in South Africa, indeed it seems to be very deeply
entrenched in us. We can debate the origins of this patriarchy and
discuss the varied roles of culture and religion in forming us as we
are, but it is in all of us. There have been huge strides in our
society where we have legislation that prohibits discrimination and
we have women in important leadership roles in all spheres of our
society, but there is no escaping the patriarchy that still exists.
One of the things I do in my job is to facilitate an ethical based
HIV prevention course with new recruits to the SANDF. In one of the
sessions the participants are asked to role play a family situation
where it emerges one of the children is sexually active. In the ten
years I have been facilitating this course, every single time I am
struck and alarmed at how these young participants of every race and
background fall into the roles of the father as the autocratic
decision maker and the wife as the submissive partner who has to calm
the domestic waters. I have tried to change the dynamics by making
the males play the roles of the females and vice versa but this makes
it even worse. I always guide the discussion after the role play into
a discussion about gender roles but for many of the participants the
roles are a given and the discussion a mere spurious distraction. I
hear these young people arguing that, “it's my culture” and “our
family works like that.” This feeds the fallacies that boys must be
tough, they must not cry or show emotion and must display physical
prowess to prove their manhood. Similarly, it feeds the fallacy that
to solve problems in relationships between men and women, men must be
better gentlemen, which Chris Roper calls a “more ethical
patriarchy.”iii
Roper
in the same article makes the plea that, “patriarchy
is going to have to undergo a violent revolution before its
proponents can understand that their way of being in the world just
doesn't work.” We live in a country where people sacrificed their
lives for freedom, but we can never truly be free where we have a
deeply patriarchal society that holds men and women in bondage in
certain roles and positions. Roper is correct in saying we need a
revolution, though I do not agree that the revolution needs to be
violent. We need to be working together as men and women. Men need to
be challenged about their patriarchal attitudes, prejudices and
behaviours. Women need to be challenged about the ways in which they
accept patriarchy and are subservient, even to abusive men. The
stories I told earlier in this article illustrate how deeply the
patriarchy is internalised by both men and women. We must be talking
to one another about our own internalised patriarchy in a way that is
non-confrontational and enabling.
There
needs to be a serious discussion at all levels of our society
concerning patriarchy and gender roles where we acknowledge that the
way things have worked in the past are no longer appropriate and
together to find a new way. This discussion (I have deliberately
avoided the word 'debate') needs to take place at all levels of our
society. As couples we need to be talking to one another about our
respective roles in the relationship. In the home we need to be
engaging our children and family to talk about gender roles. Our
LGBTI organisations need to be engaged, to help all of us understand
how roles work in non-heterosexual relationships so that we can move
away from the stereotypically patriarchal and hurtful view that one
partner has to play the 'male' role and the other the 'female' role
for the relationship to work. Our schools must be having this
discussion as part of the Life Skills curriculum and the teachers
facilitating those discussions must have been trained so that their
own attitudes and prejudices do not obstruct the process. In our
workplaces we need to be having the same discussion about how we can
identify and eliminate the patriarchy that exists there. In our
religious organisations we need to be discussing how we can eliminate
patriarchal doctrines and structures to find a theology and
structures that are inclusive and affirming of both men and women. In
our political and community organisations we need to be having a
similar discussion, with the view to expunging policies and
structures that are inherently patriarchal. One of the thorny issues
that needs to be addressed in our religious, political and community
structures is the appropriateness of separate women's organisations.
The only place I can see where a separate women's organisation might
be appropriate is where that organisation plays an advocacy role to
advance the equality of women and the abolishment of patriarchy. If
they are not willing or able to fulfil that role, they themselves
must be abolished and consigned to the patriarchy scrapheap. At a
community level we need to be talking about how our patriarchal,
traditional cultural views and structures can be revolutionised in
such a way that they too affirm equality for men and women. The media
must be involved, especially our national broadcaster, so that we can
see, hear, read and speak about the discussion taking place all
around us in our society. At government level we need to be having an
open and honest discussion with one another concerning the issue of
patriarchy and gender roles without it degenerating into petty
political point scoring against one another.
VIOLENCE
South
Africa is a violent society. Christopher Hope has this devastating
insight:
What
strikes the newcomer to South Africa is the ubiquity of violence;
just beneath the surface of life run rivers of rage. This may be so
because, ever since settlers arrived and shot the first local people
they met as a way of signalling their future intentions, all contacts
have been conflicts. It may be that, after years of enforced racial
separation, people have no idea how to reach across the divide. But
it is also, I sometimes think, because people actually like it this
way.iv
South
Africans pride themselves as being tough. So many of the terms we use
in relating to one another are violent or have violent undertones. We
threaten to kill or moer
or klap
or
break legs or use a machine gun on one another.
We become angry and aggressive on the road when we're driving. Every
day people are mugged and robbed. We beat our children even though we
know we're not supposed to. Anyone who has been into a casualty ward
at a provincial hospital on a weekend evening will have witnessed how
we resolve our differences – with guns, knives and fists. In
another study conducted by the MRC in 2012, they found that 56% of
all female homicides were committed by her intimate partner, with the
horrifying reality that every eight hours a woman in South Africa is
killed by her intimate partner.v
Very few 'peaceful' protests are ever peaceful – most degenerate
into violence and looting. The police invariably retaliate with their
own brand of brutal violence, which escalates matters even further.
We see violence on our sports fields, on our school grounds, on our
streets, on our televisions and in our homes. Gangs fight for turf,
taxi operators fight for routes. It is who we are, and as Christopher
Hope points out, it seems we enjoy it.
Violence
is the way we as South Africans have been relating to one another for
centuries. The early white settlers fought wars against various black
tribes. The various black tribes waged wars against one another. Once
whites had subjugated blacks, the violence continued unabated,
physically but also systemically through laws which deprived people
of their land and their basic human rights. Apartheid was a system
that was inherently violent and relied on violence for its
perpetuation. The various liberation movements to fight the apartheid
regime did so using their own violent methods but even within their
own organisations they used violence to subjugate their own. The SAP
and SADF in turn retaliated using extreme violence, but they too used
violence within their own organisations to subjugate their own.
Knowing where the violence comes from however, does nothing to help
us deal with its reality in the present.
We
are not officially at war with one another in South Africa any more
but we are still fighting. We have violence so etched into us as a
nation that it seems natural. It must stop. It has to stop or we are
doomed as a nation. We have to find other ways of relating to one
another apart from violence. We have to find ways of resolving our
differences apart from violence. Once again it must start in the
home. In the home we must make a commitment to one another that we
will not resort to violence to resolve our differences no matter what
or in spite of the role models we had. This must be backed up at
community level with workshops and educational programs. Religious
organisations and NGOs will need to play a leading role here as the
already overstretched government resources will not be able to cope
on their own. Schools need to be declared places of non-violence and
places where non-violent means of resolving differences are modelled.
Similarly, values of mutual respect and ubuntu
must be taught and modelled.
Bullying by teachers or learners must be identified and rooted out.
Our workplaces and sports fields must be places where violence in any
form is not tolerated. I am even beginning to think that we need to
start having a discussion about contact sports such as wrestling and
boxing, and whether those sports are appropriate given the violent
nature of our society. Our political organisations and trade unions
need to be brought on board here too, especially with regard to
helping people voice their protests and concerns in non-violent ways.
Every single government department must become involved in this quest
for non-violence, especially those in the security cluster. The media
will have to play a vital role in terms of the re-education of our
nation so that we can hear, see, read and speak about this discussion
taking place around us. Government will need to enact legislation
that supports these initiatives, for example firearm control and the
regulation of the private security industry.
There
are other risk factors that exacerbate violence against women, that
also must be addressed. The 1999 MRC study showed the following risk
factors: substance abuse, low levels of education, a criminal history
and poverty. It is obvious that all these factors feed into an
already volatile culture of violence in our society. To address all
these issues needs a multi-sectoral approach and I believe must be
driven from the very top, the Office of the President. Let us however
as ordinary citizens not sit back and expect the government to do it
all on our behalf.
LET'S
DO IT
Indeed,
we can no longer sit on the sidelines as critical spectators any
more. Let's turn our Twitter and dinner table outrage into something
useful, into something that will make a real difference. The two
issues of patriarchy and violence can and must be addressed by all of
us, men and women working together. Let's start in our homes. Let's
examine and interrogate the patriarchy that exists in our own homes.
Let's talk about the gender roles in our homes, and broaden that
discussion to the rest of our families. Let's talk about the violence
in our own homes and the way that it manifests itself amongst us in
the home. Let's make a commitment to living a non-violent way of life
and finding other means of resolving our domestic disputes. Let's
take that same discussion and commitment into our schools, workplaces
and the various organisations to which we belong. Let's become
involved in the discussions that take place at government level.
Let's be prepared to make submissions and inputs when such input is
called for. Let's support the government and NGO initiatives that are
based on our inputs and commit ourselves to becoming involved at some
level.
We
can stop the scourge of violence against women if we do it as men and
women together. Let's do it!
References:
i
Bullard
D (2013).
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=35754
ii Abrahams
N, Jewkes R & Laubsher R (1999). “
I do not believe in democracy in the home”: Men’s
relationships with and abuse of women. Cape
Town: Medical Research Council.
iii Roper
C. (2013). http://mg.co.za/article/2013-02-13-let-them-eat-cock
iv Hope
C (2013).
http://mg.co.za/article/2013-02-01-00-the-pistorius-killing-the-south-african-shots-heard-all-around
v Abrahams
N, Mathews S, Jewkes R, Martin L.J, & Lombard L (2012). Every
eight hours:
Intimate
femicide in South Africa 10 years later! Cape Town: Medical
Research Council.
