Why the focus on femicide? Look no further than the reasons women are killed by men they know
The word femicide does not appear in my seventh edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. “Female” is there, defined as “the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs”, and so is “feminism” — “advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes”.
“Femme fatale” is interestingly defined as “a dangerously attractive woman” but the nature of that danger is not enlarged upon, nor is there any mention of the act of murdering a woman, dangerous or otherwise.
The reason for this becomes clear when you get to “homicide”, which the OED says is “the killing of a human being, especially by another”.
Homicide: Life on the Streets was a long-running TV crime drama that did not see the need to differentiate, neither in its title nor in the crime-solving efforts of its protagonists, between the murders of male and female victims. Homicide departments in police forces around the world do not have separate rooms and staff allocated to different crimes based on the victim’s gender — though this may be changing.
Because they are women
There is increasingly urgent evidence for why a special focus on female victims of homicide is necessary.
A report published by Agence France-Presse to acknowledge tomorrow as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women contains some frightening numbers from a 2018 UN report on global crime. According to this research, in 2017 more than 87,000 women and girls were murdered worldwide by a partner or someone they knew.
The country at the top of this list was El Salvador, where 13.9 out of every 100,000 women were murdered in 2017. In Jamaica it was 11 per 100,000, in the Central African Republic 10.4, and in SA 9.1 — based on a 2011 study as more recent figures were not available.
As the report noted, “the real numbers are likely to be higher”. The stats, as staggering as they may be, tell only part of the story. There are men who have got away with murder and countless rapes go unreported out of fear.
As the UN report shows, SA is by no means the only country with a terrible record of violence against women.
The fact that we are “only” fourth on this shameful list should not make us feel better about ourselves, but it is useful to know: firstly because instead of dismissing the femicide scourge as just another symptom of SA’s decline, gender-based violence can be studied as a universal human problem; and secondly because international leaders and organisations have the opportunity to share resources and learn from each other in trying to combat these vile crimes.
The word femicide has not entered our vocabulary because women are different, weaker or in any way less human. The need to differentiate the murder of women from the all-encompassing “homicide” has become necessary because of the reasons women are killed.
More men are murdered every year than are women, but — and this is not to take away from the awfulness and impermissibility of such killings — most male victims are murdered by enraged rivals competing for something desired by both, either dominance in some sphere or material goods.
Women, on the other hand, are often killed precisely because they are women. They are little more than material goods, towards which the men killing them feel little moral compunction.
That might be a generalisation, but if we feel compelled to employ a different word for the murder of women it seems logical that the reasons for their being murdered are also different.
Making space for “femicide” in our lexicon is very different from setting aside a special day for women, as in the August 9 travesty that is “Women’s Day” in SA.
A public holiday designed to underline the fact that women are different?
A day on which we frantically search for women whose achievements we can celebrate because despite their inferior status they have managed to equal the achievements of men? Seriously?
I’m not complaining about the holiday — just don’t use it as an excuse to pretend that all women really are equally valued and respected as human beings.
Femicide statistics show otherwise.
More days of activism
Whatever your opinion might be of Women’s Day, as the articles about projects and interventions on pages 4 and 5 in this paper show, there is a lot that is good about the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children campaign, which begins tomorrow.
There is just one thing wrong with the campaign. The number of days allocated to it. We need to address crimes against women and the reasons for these crimes — one of which is that women are seen as lesser humans by those who rape and kill them — for more than 16 days.
We need 365 days of activism, every year. And 366 in leap years. ●
● “On Friday nights we used to get together, have something to drink and think about what we can do,” a young man from KwaZulu-Natal told researcher Benita Moolman when she was interviewing sexual offenders in prison. “‘Let’s go out and rape’ is what we would [decide].”
Moolman, who interviewed 72 convicted sexual offenders for her PhD, said the man spoke about rape in a casual manner, “very much as a form of recreation”.
Marcel Londt, head of the social welfare department at the University of the Western Cape, said SA has a culture that promotes rape.
She described how a seven-year-old girl had brought a friend to a workshop she organised for sexual abuse survivors on the Cape Flats. Londt thought the children must be in the wrong place until the girl told her: “No miss, she has been raped already.”
Londt, a former head of the Western Cape Rape Crisis board, said: “Rape, domestic violence, femicide, these are rites of passage in SA.”
Gang members, for example, see rape as a way to boost their status, much like collecting fast cars and other trophies.
Childline founder Joan van Niekerk said: “The culture of entitlement extends to sexual behaviour. We are seeing rape on an absolutely unprecedented scale.”
A convicted offender told crime researcher Chandré Gould of the Institute for Security Studies that the first girl he had sex with had previously been gang raped and had a nervous breakdown. “Why? Because her boyfriend was a gang leader and he let his whole gang rape her.”
The offender’s history is one of 19 in “Beaten Bad: The Life Stories of Serious Offenders”, a report written by Gould.
Riaan Perry, a probation officer and social worker for the Western Cape department of social development, has found that offenders often believe “a violent response is acceptable in certain situations”.
Moolman said the status of men as authority figures in SA meant they are seldom questioned about their movements, which makes it easier for them to get access to victims and protects them from suspicion.
She gave the example of a social worker who ran youth camps and who invited children to his home “to help him fix the cupboards”. He never had to explain himself.
“He would allow them to watch pornography at his house and get them to masturbate with each other. He would rape them in groups,” she said.
“The boys became younger and younger. At some point a boy who was 10 years old went to tell a teacher.”
Moolman said she had interviewed a stepfather who used his position as head of the household to grant his stepdaughter “favours”, like smoking in the house or driving in the car, then extorted sex from her.
“His belief system was different to ours,” Moolman said. “He talked about emotions and sex, but there is no way it was a relationship. Sex was not with the stepdaughter’s consent.”
Tarisai Mchuchu, executive director of Mosaic — a nongovernmental organisation that works to prevent domestic violence and supports women who have been abused — said many men refused to acknowledge that their violent behaviour constituted abuse.
Mchuchu said men who assault their partners often say, “She is not a victim, she’s my wife.”
Londt said there was a worrying trend for children to commit aggression and sexual violence against other children.
“There is a growing body of children who have been exposed to violence,” she said. Children as young as five were violating others.
According to the 2018/2019 crime statistics, minors committed 736 murders and 4,196 common assaults in the period.
Gould said: “The children who become violent men are mostly victims of violence themselves — trauma, racism, bullying, corporal punishment and brutalising institutions. Their families are often dysfunctional or broken.”
When babies and young children do not having caring adults to look after them they develop an “attachment deficit”, and related to this is a lack of empathy, common among serious offenders.
Gould’s report includes an interview with a man sentenced to jail for 80 years for the abduction, strangling and rape of three girls over a period of a few months. He also suffered as a child.
He picked up his first victim in a taxi, then drove out of town to rape and strangle her, Gould said. He then raped and killed two more girls because he felt “an overwhelming compulsion” to repeat the crime.
Gould quotes a teacher at the school of one of his victims who said she saw “many cases of children who had been raped, children raped by members of their own family”.
A study conducted in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal by Professor Rachel Jewkes of the South African Medical Research Council found that becoming a rapist is “significantly associated” with the absence of loving parents, childhood trauma, bullying and being bullied.
Researchers said an important step in reducing the incidence of rape was to protect children from early trauma and strengthen families. They also said first-time, petty offenders should not get locked into a brutalising system that turns them into hard-bitten criminals.
Only one woman or girl out of every nine who are raped is likely to report it. Others, like University of Cape Town student Uyinene Mrwetyana, have been silenced forever. Mchuchu said: “May she not have died in vain.”