Rape a weapon to lessen importance of women in society

RAPE is not sex. Rape is not sex gone wrong. Rape is not violent sex. Rape is violence.

Rape is violence because it is force intended to hurt, damage, dehumanise and kill someone. Rape is violence used to authorise and maintain power and control over another person.

Rape is violence used to replicate an imbalance of power between the abuser and the abused.

It does not happen in individual cases which require specific legal processes, campaigns and organisations to condemn it.

Instead, it keeps happening repeatedly, with a depiction of a familiar pattern of language, victims and perpetrators.

This means, therefore, there is something else that enables it to happen frequently. A social structure called patriarchy makes it happen constantly and makes it acceptable for millions to be raped regularly.

Patriarchy is a violent social structure of control and domination that defines the roles, relations, behaviour and interactions of human beings to the disadvantage and subordination of women. It instructs society to treat women as though they are inferior, invincible and relatively powerless.

Rape is the violence of power in a patriarchal society targeted towards feminine people – females, children, old people, gay people, etc.

Rape enforces submission, punishes defiance and reaffirms the powerlessness of feminine people.

As a social structure in a patriarchal society, it subconsciously informs society that men are entitled to the appearance, bodies, opinions, attention, conversation, time and decision-making of females.

Rape makes a man want the body of female as though it belongs to him, not her.

Masculinity assumes that when a female says no, she is playing hard to get.

Thus, the male adopts a prerogative of repeatedly pushing her.

Masculinity assumes that “women cannot say what they mean and they do not mean what they say”.

In this context, because it is unpleasant to be forced to do anything, females develop a coping mechanism from fear, to avoid being vulnerable to rape. Fear gets instilled on them. They become “alert” and always on the lookout to avoid attack. It becomes a matter of “keep yourself in check or else”.

Professor Pumla Gqola, in her book, Rape: A South African Nightmare, terms this changing of behaviour from females to avoid rape occurrences as the “female fear factor y”.

Rape occupied the centre of colonialism and slavery.

This is revealed in the form of the objectification of a black female body as nothing more than a sexual body during apartheid colonialism.

Sarah Baartman’s genitalia were auctioned in public as a form of entertainment in Europe during the colonial period.

The white man saw a black woman as something to exploit sexually.

In the process of land invasions in South Africa, the frontier wars for land grabs included the raping of black women by white colonisers. History confirms that towards the end of apartheid, rape of black women was prevalent by both white and black men.

“Why would most white women raped by white men lay charges against them with police officers in a white supremacist patriarchal system that not only made white women minors themselves, but also constructed the cruel myth that white men could not rape?

“And what hope could black women raped by white men have in an apartheid legal justice system?” Gqola asks.

“Given the constant active onslaught that apartheid was to black life, police stations were not exactly a place we (as black people) wanted to be anywhere near for any reason. In this context, many women felt that laying charges against black men in such a system would render them complicit with the system.”

In these contexts, society has been historically socialised to the idea that raping a black woman has no consequences.

Violating her is inoffensive because she has no value. She has no citizenship rights to do anything about being raped. She is not a complete human being. This violent manufacturing of a rape contest towards her body has socialised the black woman to accept the permanent presence of rape.

It has developed the “female fear factory” whereby she must always be attentive to evade rape. It makes her act small, quiet and invisible in society.

It is a system of violence, a social force that excludes a black female body from existence.

The sexual violation of a black woman and stripping off her citizenship has filtered over to the democratic dispensation.

In this context, Gqola says, “In the immediate aftermath of April 1994, rapecharge statistics rose, not because rape increased in a new country, but because women felt more likely to be believed. We all believed that political power would make this possible, that freedom would mean that the police force and the criminal justice system would belong to us too.”

However, this proved not to be the case.

The democratic judiciary, instead, is another patriarchal platform that exposes rape survivors to more danger instead of relief.

During a rape trial, the sex history of a female is questioned to determine whether she has previous instances of “looking for sex”.

This court process, particularly cross-examination, is patriarchal because its language is so flawed such that it can put sex and rape on the same category.

This judicial process socialises rape victims to the idea that there is little hope in their violence meeting justice.

This is another aspect that instigates the “female fear factory” whereby females fear reporting rape cases because the judiciary will expose them to more humiliation than justice.

Thus, they never exercise their right as citizens of having access to courts due to the structural restriction imposed by the “female fear factory”.

Patriarchy has deeply entrenched the handling of women in society as though they do not matter.

It has subconsciously trained women to accept situations that yield their subjugation. Society has raised women to believe that the purpose of their bodies is to sat- isfy men sexually.

They have been socialised to believe in the permanent presence of rape.

In a patriarchal society, sexual violence becomes a lifestyle. It becomes a culture.

Hence, for women to survive in such a society, they must limit and navigate their movement in a psychological and physical manner.

This makes women unable to enjoy benefits of citizenship such as the freedom of movement, walking at midnight alone or walking through a taxi rank freely without experiencing fear, verbal insults and belittling whistles. Masculinity is present in those spaces ready to discharge its patriarchal responsibilities of removing citizenship from a female body.

Any act of resistance towards this normalised violent behaviour is regarded as “overreaction” and, therefore, “deviant”.

In this context, females develop a fear of opposing the patriarchal society because they will be deemed “deviant”.

As a coping mechanism, they fearfully navigate their movement, they psychologically and physically make themselves small, quiet, and invisible.

In a patriarchal society, sexual violence becomes a lifestyle