Amanda Gouws

VALENCIA Farmer was 14 years old when she was brutally gang- raped and murdered. She was stabbed 53 times. That was in 1999 and her killer was only sentenced for the crime 17 years later.

Sihle Sikoji was 19 years old and some men didn’t like the fact that she was a lesbian. So they stabbed her to death with a spear.

Anene Booysen was gang raped and disembowelled in 2013. Less than a month later athlete Oscar Pistorius shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp through a closed toilet door.

Just this month, Karabo Mokoena became the latest face of South Africa’s gender-based violence epidemic. She was killed and her body was burnt beyond recognition, allegedly by her ex-boyfriend.

People remember these gruesome cases that end up on newspapers’ front pages. These women’s stories come with a flare-up of societal outrage, protest and collective introspection. Then South Africans live in hope for a while, believing this time something might change. However, nothing does, in a country marked by unusually high levels of rape and femicide.

There is little fluctuation in these statistics, which are reported annu- ally by the SAPS.

What this means is that without political will, a change in the sensationalism and narratives around the reporting of gender-based violence, and without men’s greater involvement as allies with women when it comes to gender-based violence, nothing will change.

One of the problems is how violence against women is reported.

A 2011 study by the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre found that court proceedings got a lot of media coverage if they met a simple, grisly requirement: They should be brutal and shocking.

Brutality may capture people’s attention, but a lot of discussion around gender-based violence in South Africa is devoid of contextual analysis.

This comes with consequences. It normalises violence and narratives are produced in popular reporting that don’t help society identify the right interventions for dealing with violence. People come to think that the solution to gender-based violence lies in greater incarceration and retributive justice, rather than interventions with society at large that produces violent men. In the absence of interventions, women vent their frustrations and pain in Twitter hashtags such as #MenAreTrash. These stigmatise all men as contributing to gender-based violence.

As I perused the newspapers, online reporting and Sunday papers after Mokoena’s death, I read the

PICTURE: SIYABULELA DUDA Minister for Women in the Presidency Susan Shabangu has shown little will to genuinely tackle gender-based violence.