Bridget Hilton-Barber looks at South Africa’s achievements in women empowerment
Have women in Parliament done more than add a dose of colour and culture change to the staid Parliament of old? Has life changed for the average South African woman?
If laws and government policies were the sole barometer of improvements, yes. Equality is guaranteed in the Constitution and ground-breaking legislation has granted women the right to free education and basic health care and equal employment opportunities.
But by no means does National Women’s Day call for the unrestrained popping of champagne corks. Progressive policies do not automatically guarantee progressive practices, and along with the difficulties of translating promises into action, unemployment, domestic violence, rape and archaic attitudes continue to loom like menacing roadblocks on the road to equality.
The government’s commitment to improving the lives of women may be genuine, but those changes ultimately depend on delivery. “While there have been significant changes,” says Barbara Klugman, director of the Women’s Health Project, which has helped shape government policies, “like the shifting of focus to primary health care and the right to free and safe abortions, there needs to be a level of realism.”
Measuring improvements, she says, like increased access to clinics, for example, must take into account the fact that the entire health system has had to change from top to bottom.
A major and positive implication of this restructuring is that the health services have become a “one-stop shop”. Where women would previously have had to go to one clinic for contraception and another for medical check-ups, say, these services are now accessible in one place.
The Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act has been another achievement says Klugman. Between February and December 1997, 26 406 safe abortions were carried out – and while there have been complaints about the attitudes of medical staff, and problems like women seeking abortions too late, these are now less a matter of structure than of education and training.
The country’s population policy also marks a further achievement for women: shifting the focus away from control to development and education. One of the biggest challenges in this area, says Klugman, is how to combat teenage pregnancy – 47% of black South African women have their first child before the age of 20.
The biggest problem in health terms, says Klugman, remains the government’s lack of leadership in dealing with Aids. Black women are the most vulnerable to HIV transmission, and there should be a massive public-awareness drive to educate people.
The welfare front has also seen important changes for women in the past four years, but delivery and administrative difficulties are no strangers to the area. “There have been major improvements in thinking and in policy and approach,” says University of Natal researcher Francie Lund, “but the distribution of resources remains a problem.”
The government, she says, seems to be more conscious of the vulnerability of women and children. The maintenance Bill aims to do away with certain legal formalities which slowed the process of payment.
State maintenance grants now reach three million women as opposed to 300 000, but financial constraints remain, and controversy, like the lowering of the ages of children eligible for maintenance. It’s hard to protect the poor and disadvantaged in a recession, says Lund.
Debbie Budlender, of the Community Agency for Social Change, says: “The face of the government has changed. Women make up 27% of our parliamentarians as opposed to 3% before.”
One of the areas in which South Africa is regarded as something of a gender pioneer, says Budlender, is that of the women’s budget – a collaborative effort between NGOs and Parliament to quantify equality by looking at the allocation of resources to women within the entire budgetary process.
While the employment equity Bill and affirmative action policies within business and industry have seen increased numbers of women climbing the ladders of success, adult education remains a problem, says Budlender. Twenty per cent of African women have never been to school and only 1% of the entire education budget is set aside for adult education.
For rural women, initiatives like the government’s water programme, and the extension of services like electricity and telephones, have a potentially great impact on cutting labour time and raising standards of living.
Worthy of celebration are a series of new draft laws. The domestic violence Bill tabled two weeks ago, for instance, protects any victim in a “domestic relationship”. This means that not only married women have recourse to action as in previous laws, but that women “dating” their partners are now also protected.
The draft recognition of customary marriages Bill will recognise customary unions as civil marriages. A code on sexual harassment also presents guidelines on what constitutes harassment and what can be done about it.
But while laws and policies have changed, power relations have not. Rape is still an enormous problem. A woman is raped every 36 seconds. Last year this translated into almost 50 000 rapes, which police say must be multiplied 20 times to get closer to the real figure.
While life may have improved in various ways for the average South African woman over the past four years, genuine equality still has to cross the chasm of fear and violence. That will be the litmus test of the next four years.