'These women, they force us to rape them': Rape as narrative of social control in post-apartheid South Africa

Journal of Southern African Studies

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 129-144

  Moffett, Helen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

APARTHEID; GENDER RELATIONS; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; VIOLENCE;

AFRICA; SOUTH AFRICA; SOUTHERN AFRICA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA;

EID: 33644872591     PISSN: 03057070     EISSN: 14653893     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03057070500493845     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. 'Gender: The New Struggle', which surveyed 3,500 participants, was issued by the Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing at the University of Cape Town in November 2004.
2. Some studies have turned up even higher figures than cited here; there was shock when a survey of over 2,000 male Cape Town City Council workers revealed that 48 per cent of them had physically abused a domestic partner at least once. This figure was expected to be significantly lower than the estimated national average, given that the study population was in secure employment. See N. Abrahams, R. Jewkes and R. Laubsher, '"I do not believe in democracy in the home": Men's Relationships with and Abuse of Women' (Cape Town, Medical Research Council of South Africa [hereafter MRCSA], 1999).
3. At present, this takes the form of a number of papers: 'Entering the Labyrinth: Coming to Grips with Gender Warzones, Using South Africa as a Case Study', in Partners in Change: Working with Men to End Gender-Based Violence (Santo Domingo, United Nations INSTRAW, 2002)
4. 'Speaking the Unspeakable: Narratives Surrounding the Rape of Children' (paper presented at the International Conference of the Child Accident Prevention Foundation at the Colleges of Medicine, Cape Town, South Africa, in October 2003)
5. 'Stemming the Tide: Countering Public Narratives of Sexual Violence' (paper presented [by Womankind Worldwide] at the Commission on the Status of Women in New York City, February/March 2003)
6. 'Constructing Sexual Aggression and Vulnerability: Further Thoughts on the Body Politics of Rape' (the latter three papers were all commissioned by Womankind Worldwide during 2003)
7. 'Testing Western Theories About Rape in the South African Context: New Models for Education and Activism' (paper presented at Rape Crisis, Cape Town, August 2002)
8. '"Telling Stories, Telling Lies": Erasure and Distortion in Narratives of Rape and Race in Popular South African Discourse' (paper presented at the University of the Western Cape, July 2002)
9. 'The Failure of Rhetoric in Discourses of Rape' (paper presented at the Association for Rhetoric and Communication in Southern Africa Symposium'Rhetoric at the Margins', Roma, Lesotho, July 2002)
10. 'The Grammar of Rape: Mental Health Implications for Society and the Survivors of Violence' (paper presented at the Dept of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town Medical School, February 2002)
11. 'Monsters and Masks: The Problem of Representing the Rapist in South Africa' (paper presented at the African Gender Institute Associates' Conference, Cape Town, July 2001).
12. See K. Wood, F. Maforah and R. Jewkes, 'Sex, Violence and Constructions of Love among Xhosa Adolescents: Putting Violence on the Sexuality Education Agenda' (Cape Town, MRCSA, 1996)
13. K. Wood and R. Jewkes, '"Love is a Dangerous Thing": Micro-Dynamics of Violence in Sexual Relationships of Young People in Umtata' (Cape Town, MRCSA, 1998)
14. L. Denny et al., 'Sexual Violence Against Women: A Significant Health Problem' (Findings of the Rape Protocol Project at Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, presented at the South African Colleges of Medicine Annual Symposium on Violence, May 2002).
15. See L. Vogelman, The Sexual Face of Violence (Ravan, Johannesburg, 1990)
16. I. Niehaus, '"Now everyone is doing it": Towards a Social History of Rape in the Southern African Lowveld' (paper presented at the WISER Sex and Secrecy Conference at the University of the Witwatersrand, 2003)
17. and D. Bhana, 'Violence and the Gendered Negotiation of Masculinity among Young Black School Boys in South Africa', in L. Ouzgane and R. Morrell (eds), African Masculinities (Durban, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press and Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
18. See, for instance, S. Arne (ed.), Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa (Uppsala, Sweden, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2004)
19. and the special issue, 'Sexual Cultures', of Feminist Africa, 5 (December 2005).
20. Much important work in this field is in the form of ongoing and still-unpublished research. Some published pieces include L. Vetten, 'Roots of a Rape Crisis', Crime and Conflict, 8 (1997)
21. T. Sideris, 'Rape in War and Peace: Social Context, Gender, Power and Identity', in S. Meintjies, A. Pillay and M. Turshen (eds), The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation (London, Zed Books, 2001)
22. D. Posel, 'The Scandal of Manhood: "Baby Rape" and the Politicization of Sexual Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa', Culture, Health and Sexuality, 7, 1 (January 2005).
23. See for instance, the introduction in K. Jayawardena and M. de Alwis (eds), Embodied Violence: Communalising Women's Sexuality in South Asia (Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1996)
24. A. Mama, 'Sheroes and Villains: Conceptualizing Colonial and Contemporary Violence Against Women in Africa', in M.J. Alexander and C.T. Mohanty (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York, Routledge, 1997)
25. and D. Green, Gender Violence in Africa (New York, St Martin's Press, 1999).
26. See, inter alia, S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1975)
27. C. MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1989)
28. A.N. Groth, Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender (New York and London, Plenum Press, 1979)
29. D. Scully, Understanding Sexual Violence: A Study of Convicted Rapists (New York, Routledge, 1994)
30. A.J. Cahill, Rethinking Rape (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2001).
31. S. Meintjies, A. Pillay and M. Turshen (eds), The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation (London, Zed Books, 2001) serves as a useful introduction to the literature in this field.
32. See P. Scully, 'Rape, Race and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Cape Colony, South Africa', The American Historical Review, 100, 2 (April 1995). The area of gender-based violence (which might include domestic violence, spousal/partner abuse, abuse of the girlchild, human trafficking, as well as attacks motivated by homophobia) is too broad to scrutinise for purposes of this discussion.
33. Official (police) anti-rape education strategies in South Africa prior to this date contained standard warnings on avoiding the perils of 'dark alleys' and 'short skirts'; these explicitly addressed potential victims only, not perpetrators.
34. W. Johnson, 'Are Whites (and Men) Ready for Democracy?' (unpublished paper, presented at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, 2003), p. 14.
35. As early as 1995, Human Rights Watch had published a damning report, 'Violence against Women in South Africa: State Response to Domestic Violence and Rape' (New York, Human Rights Watch, 1995).
36. See in particular Chapter Five, 'The Magnitude of the Problem', pp. 44-59.
37. Meintjies, Pillay and Turshen (eds), The Aftermath, p. 4.
38. At the same time, he denounced a senior UN office-bearer, Kathleen Cravero, claiming that her statement (relating to HIV/AIDS) that many African women were unable to negotiate consent, much less condom use, stereotyped African men as 'violent sexual predators'. See 'Letter from President Thabo Mbeki', ANC Today, 4, 39, (1-7 October 2004), available at http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/2004/at39.htm
39. and C. Smith, 'Keeping it in their Pants: Politicians, Men and Sexual Assault in South Africa' (Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture, Durban, 17 March 2005).
40. Lisa Vetten of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, in a response in the Mail & Guardian, 29 October 2004, argued that neither Smith nor Mbeki had cited the correct figures in enumerating the number of South African women who had been raped (Mbeki, working naïvely on the assumption that all rapes were reported to the police, cited reported crime figures only, whereas Smith simply multiplied the number of reported rapes by a 'guesstimate' of 20). Vetten nevertheless noted that even the most conservative of the professional surveys (see Note 1) reflected exceptionally and disturbingly high figures for rape. Joan van Niekerk, the national co-ordinator of Childline South Africa, also issued an open letter to Mbeki in which she deplored the attack on Smith and debunked the watered-down statistics on rape and child abuse presented by the spokesperson for the National Commissioner of Police in the press. She went on to entreat the President and the police not to stifle efforts to discuss violence against women and children with misleading accusations of racism (posted on the GWS Africa listserve hosted by the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town on 11 October 2004).
41. See C. Smith, Proud of Me: Speaking Out against Sexual Violence and HIV (Johannesburg, Penguin, 2001), pp. xiv, 268-9.
42. Smith, 'Keeping it in their Pants'.
43. Magona is perhaps best known abroad for Mother to Mother (Cape Town, David Philip, 1998), her fictional collection of letters between the mothers of murdered Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl and the young South African political activist who struck her down.
44. I am aware that data gleaned from crisis organisations are not usually statistically useful, given the cultural disparities and practical barriers that inform whether or not a woman is able to call a helpline. Such disparities doubtlessly explain why so many of my callers were middle-class, educated women. Nevertheless, the point remains that they were not being abused or violated by impoverished strangers, but usually by their equally middle-class and educated partners.
45. This is not necessarily indicative of obtuseness; it reflects perhaps the anxieties found within a post-apartheid society facing not only the same endemic racial tensions that occur in any racially or ethnically diverse society, but also battling the demons of a recent past of institutionalised racism.
46. INSTRAW UN, Partners in Change, p. 60.
47. A. Davis, Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist (New York, Vintage Books, 1983).
48. It is not just locally that I encounter the assumption that my work must necessarily highlight the 'barbarism' of black men. During a visit to the US in 2000, after I had assured an American academic at a respectable college that black South African men were not hell-bent on punitively raping white women (an impression he seemed to have gleaned from reading J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace), he responded, 'You mean they do this to their own kind?'
49. In ' Constructing Sexual Aggression and Vulnerability', I argue that rape is easily simulated: All that is required is the means of immobilising the intended victim and a penetrative or blunt instrument. It goes without saying that I do not advocate that women 'try this out at home' (simply presenting this information evokes revulsion and shock from my audiences); rather, my intention is to separate the choreography of rape from the biology of penetrative sexual intercourse. Too many people assume that only those able to produce an erect penis are able to 'perform' rape, whereas a small but significant number of rape survivors report that their attackers could not sustain erections, and therefore resorted to hands or other instruments.
50. These are the very terms used in almost every public discussion of the topic; the Harold Wolpe Forum debate in Cape Town, 23 March 2005, on 'Gender-Based Violence and Sexuality in South Africa' being a case in point. (Summary notes of the discussion from the floor were kindly provided by Tracey Bailey of the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust; www.wolpetrust.org.za.)
51. 'Gangs and Sexuality on the Cape Flats', African Gender Institute Newsletter, 7 (December 2000). Available at http://web.uct.ac.za/org/agi/pubs/newsletters/vol7/elaine.htm.
52. A. Mager, 'Youth Organizations and the Construction of Masculine Identities in the Ciskei and Transkei, 1945-1960', Journal of Southern Africa Studies, 24, 4 (December 1998), p. 663.
53. In a nutshell, women who experience identical pressures and deprivations may respond in a multitude of maladaptive ways - but they do not resort to sexual violence.
54. The UCT Unilever study noted that 'conflict or violence happened mostly when a chauvinistic male was in a relationship with a woman with a liberated mind' (Cape Times, 15 November 2004).
55. And of course, nearly five decades of apartheid rule were preceded by centuries of colonial rule and enslavement.
56. 'Social Change, Social Inequality, and Intergroup Tensions', Social Forces (December 1996), p. 404.
57. Cited in Johnson, 'Are Whites (and Men) Ready for Democracy?', p. 14.
58. Lynching here refers to the extra-judicial acts of kidnapping, whipping, torture and murder, often of black men, and often on the grounds that they had shown an illicit sexual interest in a white woman, which took place in the Southern states of the USA in the early decades of the twentieth century. See V. Ware's 'To Make the Facts Known: Racial Terror and the Construction of White Femininity'
59. and H.V. Carby's '"On the Threshold of Women's Era": Lynching, Empire and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory', in R. Lewis and S. Mills (eds), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2003), for useful theoretical models for 'reading' lynching.
60. P. Scully, Liberating the Family: Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853 (Cape Town, David Philip, 1995), p. 172.
61. Black men under apartheid who did rape white women were generally harshly dealt with by the criminal justice system, some of them receiving the death penalty. However, under apartheid, the system of prosecuting sexual violence was simultaneously so racist and sexist that both victims and alleged perpetrators invariably had their rights trampled. For a comparison of lynching and rape scares in South Africa see P. Scully, 'Race and Ethnicity in Women's and Gender History in Global Perspective', in B. Smith (ed.), Women's History in Global Perspective (Champaign, IL, University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 195-228, 217-21.
62. It must be stressed that although the kinds of 'controlling' narratives of violence under scrutiny here were enacted by whites (or their representatives) upon blacks, they would have been internalised to varying degrees by all South Africans living under apartheid, regardless of race, class or gender.
63. Readers of this article who live outside of South Africa have queried whether all South African women do indeed live in fear of rape. This is impossible to prove statistically, and of course, the degree of such fear is determined by the widely variant risks and resources presented to women (whether they travel to work by public transport or after dark, whether they can afford burglar bars and alarms, and so on). Nevertheless, visitors are often shocked by the extent to which many South African women self-regulate their movements and adopt guarded patterns of living. I regularly interact with visiting North American and European students, and am invariably struck by the untrammelled sense of freedom with which many of these young women move around and conduct themselves socially, in sharp contrast to the cautious demeanour of my female South African students.
64. Servants are, of course, privy to a great deal of sensitive and intimate information about their employers: Digestive disorders, sexual habits, menstrual cycles, drinking patterns, parenting problems, family conflicts and so on. This is a well-trodden path within the field of Marxist feminism and slavery studies.
65. This 'learned helplessness' is being passed on to middle-class blacks, now the largest group in Southern Africa employing domestic workers, chars, childminders and gardeners.
66. In Vogelman's study (the only one so far on South African rapists), the researcher's study population comprised rapists who had evaded the criminal justice system (the cases against them had been dismissed for technical reasons, their victims had been unable to face the courts, etc). Some of these subjects expressed indignation that an act as normative as rape should be criminalised.
67. The relationship between construction of identity and sexual violence is an area that requires closer scrutiny than is possible here.
68. For a useful account of the way the women's movement has interacted with the state in the last 25 years, see S. Hassim, Women's Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Madison, WI, Wisconsin University Press, 2005).
69. N. Hoad, K. Martin and G. Reid (eds), chart the story of how sexual equality came to be included in the new Constitution in Sex and Politics in South Africa (Cape Town, Doublestorey Books, 2005).
70. A. Mama, 'Editorial', Feminist Africa: National Politricks, 3 (2004), pp. 2-3.
71. See Note 31.
72. Personal communication to the author, July 2004.
73. Abrahams, Jewkes and Laubsher, 'I do not believe in democracy in the home'.
74. D. Posel, 'The Scandal of Manhood', Culture, Health and Sexuality, 7, 1 (January 2005), pp. 239-52. The value of Posel's work is that it uses gender as a primary lens for framing questions of rape, male sexuality and citizenship.
75. When heterosexual women do enjoy equality in the family and other domestic spaces, the general perception is that they are 'permitted' to do so by a liberal partner, rather than entitled to do so.
76. Crisis centres and NGOs on three continents use my materials for training purposes, as do lecturers at local medical schools. Health-care providers in the public sector have informed me that my work is useful to them because it is accessible rather than strictly academic. I am perpetually torn between locating my work so that it meets the criteria of the academe and peer evaluation, and framing it so that it has wider practical application, a struggle clearly visible in this piece.
77. For an overview of these efforts, see Morrell, 'Men, Movements and Gender Transformation', in Morrell and Ouzgane (eds), African Masculinities.
78. 'Real Men Don't Rape Women and Children', SAPA, 17 November 2003
79. cited in K. Butler-Wall, 'The Regulation of White Women's Sexuality' (unpublished dissertation, School for International Training, Cape Town, 2004), p. 43.
80. At the Women in Post-War Reconstruction conference in 1999, discussion groups reconstructed this question as follows: 'What do men lack that makes them inflict violence on women [and children]?' A. Pillay, 'Violence Against Women in the Aftermath', The Aftermath, p. 43.
81. Centre for Applied Legal Studies, 'Gender Equality: Can it Still Work for Women in South Africa?' (unpublished project, Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, 2004).
82. Cited in Smith, Proud of Me, p. 211.