South Africa’s femicide shame

Without urgent intervention, the seemingly endless list of brutality and loss will go on, writes

word “scourge” several times. This creates the impression that violence is visited upon us like the plagues in the Bible, without us knowing who is doing it or why.

It makes the perpetrators of violence invisible. It also suggests that there’s a cure, if we just wait long enough. This type of reporting encourages short-term responses but not immediate committed action and interventions.

When Booysen’s killer applied for bail, the then-minister of women, youth and people with disabilities, Lulu Xingwana, shouted “all rapists must rot in jail”.

During Pistorius’s trial the governing party’s women’s league echoed this sentiment.

It is clear from these remarks that the governing ANC sees higher incarceration rates as the solution to rape and femicide. Its members’ oft-repeated cry of “rot in jail” also suggests that rehabilitation is not viewed as a priority. The problem is that this response individualises the challenge of violence.

It focuses on individual perpetrators without attempting to understand the very complex social conditions in South Africa that contribute to men’s violent behaviour. These conditions include colonial and apartheid histories of violence, endemic poverty, substance abuse, deeply held patriarchal attitudes about women’s place in society and the emasculation of unemployment when men measure their worth through work, or an absence of it.

These issues all beg for solutions on a collective level. Without that sort of intervention, gender-based violence will continue unabated.

There is also a visible absence of political will to fight these kinds of crimes. After Booysen’s murder, enraged South Africans called for a national council on gender-based violence to be formed.

President Jacob Zuma agreed to this and asked then-minister of women, youth and people with disabilities to spearhead the initiative.

But after the country’s 2014 election the ministry was closed down. Now women’s issues are represented by a single minister in the Presidency, and there’s no sign of the council that was promised.

Susan Shabangu, who is the Minister for Women in the Presidency, has not demonstrated much will to genuinely tackle gender-based violence. She recently described Mokoena as weak, saying this caused her death.

Here we see the lack of political will to deal with sexual violence: the minister has not initiated any interventions or projects to deal with the country’s outrageous proportion of gender based violence. South Africans are frustrated. Some express their feelings of hopelessness around violence on social media, tagging posts with #MenAreTrash. This is an example of women finding solidarity in their victimisation through telling their stories of sexual violence. These stories must be told and heard because they show how vast the problem is and how women rarely speak out.

But this particular campaign also stigmatises all men as deviant. Many men may react by becoming defensive.

Potential allies are alienated. Gender-based violence will only diminish if men and women unite to fight against it. Men have an important role to play in this struggle. Men will have to speak out to other men who are contributing to rape culture. They must start to address other men’s perceptions and stereotypes about women’s sexuality.

They must call out men who believe women can be beaten to “discipline” them, or who refer to women as “sluts” when they do not like their behaviour.

Without intervention, the problem of sexual violence will not stop. Mokoena’s name will be joined by hundreds more on a never-ending list of loss and brutality. – The Conversation Africa ● Gouws is professor of political science at Stellenbosch University