Violence not only physical
“Symbolic violence is in many ways much more powerful than actual violence or assault in that it is embedded in the ways people act and their consciousness and it imposes the spectre of legitimacy on the social order,” says research associate in the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies at the University of Pretoria, Mary Crewe.
Crewe spoke at the PROBUS club meeting at the R72 saloon on Tuesday, November 8.
She focused on how symbolic violence aids the occurrence or incidence of Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) in SA.
The well-versed speaker has widely published and challenged prevailing orthodoxies about HIV/ Aids, sexualities and gender.
Crewe established the Centre for Sexualities, Aids and Gender at the University of Pretoria and served as an advisor to the vice chancellor and executive on social and gender justice, from 2020 to 2022.
“Violence is not only the physical endpoint – the obvious and reportable acts – but this endpoint needs also to be measured by other forms of violence that lay the ground work for acts of violence and abuse,” she said.
Crewe explored the concept of symbolic violence, which she said needed to be understood before associating GBV with physical violence and bodily harm.
“Symbolic violence is the shadow over our society, over our relationships, our language and our institutions.
“Symbolic violence operates at a number of levels and is so entrenched in our taken for granted, everyday realities that it is difficult to identify and understand.
“These realities have been forged over time through culture, religion, education, traditions and the institutions of the modern state,” she explained.
She said this form of violence, often referred to as “soft violence”, was more prevalent.
Symbolic violence included actions that have discriminatory, humiliating, injurious or undignified consequences, she said.
“It maintains its effects through the mis-recognition of power relations situated in social and political structures,” she said.
“While it requires something that dominates, it also requires the dominated to accept the position.”
Before playing a video clip of women talking of their experiences of symbolic violence, Crewe made the audience aware of the indignities that many women confront daily.
“For women this means having to be careful about what they wear, knowing which routes they walk or travel in are safe, having to navigate spaces such as restaurants and bars alone, having to pass groups of men and be verbally harassed and being cat called,” she explained.
When normalised in society, it becomes normative violence.
“It is the status quo – it’s the way we behave. It becomes road rage, drunken rages, illegal acts, bad driving, acts of verbal aggression, small acts of physical assault, emotional and mental violence and it’s like beavers building a dam – small sticks piled on other sticks all balanced and supported by one another interwoven and united and holding back the water, and suddenly one day it all becomes too much and the symbolic and normative violence can’t hold and the actual physical violence, assault, rapes, femicide and murder and attacks on children take place,” she said.
Crewe said many women reported that their experience of symbolic and normative violence was in some way more difficult to deal with than physical acts because it was so deeply entrenched, hard to challenge and often the challenge led to physical violence. Furthermore, she said there also needed to be more awareness of man-to-man violence and violence against people of different gender and sexual identities.
“Until we come to understand how deeply we are all entrenched in symbolic and normative violence and how we all live in families, communities and institutions where fairness, justice, opportunity, honesty and equality do not prevail, it is hypocritical to talk about other men as ‘barbaric’, a social problem as a ‘scourge’, as ‘animals’, and about women as ‘passive’, ‘victims’ or indeed as provocative.
“In this way we strip them of their agency and reduce them to subjects rather than citizens,” she said.
Crewe said fundamentally, in all kinds of ways, and across race and class, economic and social issues, our society has lost integrity.
“There is something deeply wrong with our society and men who are violent are a reflection of this and I think the problem lies deep in the various levels of violence we have rather than just in the behaviour of men,” she said.
Though saying there were not any easy solutions, she said SGBV was fuelled by class, among other factors.
“I do know that violence is based in orthodoxy and beliefs about culture, behaviour and attitudes.
“I do know that violence is tied to notions of rights – of the rights that men believe they have and can withhold from others,” she said.
“I do know that when we interrogate the levels of violence and our places within them that we can provide an enabling space for all people to occupy their rightful place in our society with respect, dignity and pleasure.
“I do know it’s hard work, but in the end it’s about us not about them.”