Rape is never far from the headlines in South Africa. But while protests about corruption and service delivery are common, sexual violence is not an issue that often brings people to the streets.
A university in one of the country’s small towns is changing this.
The protest at Rhodes was set in action by two events.
One was an awareness campaign consisting of posters relating to rape culture at the university.
The second was the posting of a list featuring alleged perpetrators’ names.
These events set off a groundswell of support: a lid was lifted on the anger fuelled by the injustice of sexual violence. Wrath – at the act itself, the silence, the othering, the stigmatisation, the secondary victimisation, the victim-blaming – can no longer be contained.
The protesters include men and women, black and white people, but it is angry young, black women at the forefront of the movement.
Some people are quite astounded by what’s happening at the university.
Surely, the thinking goes, Rhodes is well set up to deal with these issues.
It has hosted a successful annual anti-rape silent protest for some years.
It has a harassment office, a counselling service and an established sexual offences policy.
It offers several gender courses and is home to the student-driven gender action project as well as having a senate subcommittee called the gender action forum.
But to think this is to miss the major point.
Initiatives like these, and the many others that exist in South Africa, haven’t fundamentally shifted the hetero-patriarchal power relations on which sexual violence, as well as the stigmatisation and silencing of survivors, are based.
Some senior staff at Rhodes have argued, with the best of intentions, that nothing can be done unless the survivors of sexual violence lay a charge.
They fail to recognise that the gendered dynamics within which women live, including a legal system stacked against convictions, make such reporting virtually impossible.
Significance of the protest
The protests come at a time marked by the emergence of a deep-seated and sustained anger. This anger refuses to see sexual violence simply as a case of criminality that needs reasonable structures for prosecution. Instead, it brings into the foreground the systemic injustices within which women’s bodies are objectified, denigrated and abused.
Sexual violence in South Africa is pervasive. It occurs across the usual dividing lines of race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity and religious belief. The country is represented both nationally and internationally as being “rape dense” – and with good reason.
But what will happen from here? Will the protests be remembered 10 years from now as the moment when rape culture started to unravel in South Africa? Or will people look back on this as a difficult time that exhausted everybody and made a few small gains?
Clearly, the answer lies in what happens next.
Learning from similar events in the past would be important. For example, in the US in the early 1970s, the radical feminist movement organised speak-outs about sexual violence. There was a groundswell of support as in the case of the Rhodes anti-rape protests. Gradually, however, the movement was tamed and professionalised.
Responses to rape became psychologised. Individuals were tasked with taking on the labour of recovering from a traumatised state rather than systems being required to fundamentally change.
Ethics of justice vs ethics of care
There appear to be two key issues in moving forward.
The first is whether the energy generated from the protest will be sustained. Will it be able to start the complex and difficult process of systemic change – to effect the social justice concerning sexual violence that has, so far, escaped South Africans?
The second is whether the movement will manage to balance the ethics of justice with the ethics of care.
A key element of feminist work is providing safe, caring, contained spaces for healing and solidarity.
As in the US example from the 1970s, though, there is the potential for this impetus to become the main focus, with the drive for justice taking a back seat.
And, if social justice is the aim, then nuanced understandings of justice are needed. Retributive justice must be supplemented with frameworks that provide reparative and restorative justice.
The politics of recognition – for example, of women’s bodies as sites of beauty and agency – needs to be paired with the politics of redistribution – of economic resources and equitable gendered power relations.
Catriona Macleod is professor of psychology and Kim Barker is a PhD candidate in psychology, both at Rhodes University.
This article is from The Conversation
Angry protests have put rape back on SA agenda
A university in one of the country’s small towns is changing this.
The protest at Rhodes was set in action by two events.
One was an awareness campaign consisting of posters relating to rape culture at the university.
The second was the posting of a list featuring alleged perpetrators’ names.
These events set off a groundswell of support: a lid was lifted on the anger fuelled by the injustice of sexual violence. Wrath – at the act itself, the silence, the othering, the stigmatisation, the secondary victimisation, the victim-blaming – can no longer be contained.
The protesters include men and women, black and white people, but it is angry young, black women at the forefront of the movement.
Some people are quite astounded by what’s happening at the university.
Surely, the thinking goes, Rhodes is well set up to deal with these issues.
It has hosted a successful annual anti-rape silent protest for some years.
It has a harassment office, a counselling service and an established sexual offences policy.
It offers several gender courses and is home to the student-driven gender action project as well as having a senate subcommittee called the gender action forum.
But to think this is to miss the major point.
Initiatives like these, and the many others that exist in South Africa, haven’t fundamentally shifted the hetero-patriarchal power relations on which sexual violence, as well as the stigmatisation and silencing of survivors, are based.
Some senior staff at Rhodes have argued, with the best of intentions, that nothing can be done unless the survivors of sexual violence lay a charge.
They fail to recognise that the gendered dynamics within which women live, including a legal system stacked against convictions, make such reporting virtually impossible.
Significance of the protest
The protests come at a time marked by the emergence of a deep-seated and sustained anger. This anger refuses to see sexual violence simply as a case of criminality that needs reasonable structures for prosecution. Instead, it brings into the foreground the systemic injustices within which women’s bodies are objectified, denigrated and abused.
Sexual violence in South Africa is pervasive. It occurs across the usual dividing lines of race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity and religious belief. The country is represented both nationally and internationally as being “rape dense” – and with good reason.
But what will happen from here? Will the protests be remembered 10 years from now as the moment when rape culture started to unravel in South Africa? Or will people look back on this as a difficult time that exhausted everybody and made a few small gains?
Clearly, the answer lies in what happens next.
Learning from similar events in the past would be important. For example, in the US in the early 1970s, the radical feminist movement organised speak-outs about sexual violence. There was a groundswell of support as in the case of the Rhodes anti-rape protests. Gradually, however, the movement was tamed and professionalised.
Responses to rape became psychologised. Individuals were tasked with taking on the labour of recovering from a traumatised state rather than systems being required to fundamentally change.
Ethics of justice vs ethics of care
There appear to be two key issues in moving forward.
The first is whether the energy generated from the protest will be sustained. Will it be able to start the complex and difficult process of systemic change – to effect the social justice concerning sexual violence that has, so far, escaped South Africans?
The second is whether the movement will manage to balance the ethics of justice with the ethics of care.
A key element of feminist work is providing safe, caring, contained spaces for healing and solidarity.
As in the US example from the 1970s, though, there is the potential for this impetus to become the main focus, with the drive for justice taking a back seat.
And, if social justice is the aim, then nuanced understandings of justice are needed. Retributive justice must be supplemented with frameworks that provide reparative and restorative justice.
The politics of recognition – for example, of women’s bodies as sites of beauty and agency – needs to be paired with the politics of redistribution – of economic resources and equitable gendered power relations.
Catriona Macleod is professor of psychology and Kim Barker is a PhD candidate in psychology, both at Rhodes University.
This article is from The Conversation
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