A new survey shows that South African women are more likely to be killed by their partners than by strangers. Tangeni Amupadhi reports
To reach her Lenasia home, Yasmin Fakir walks across a field where there have been several rapes and murders. But it is only when she opens her front door that she feels afraid.
Fakir (not her real name) has been raped and beaten by her husband. He has come close to killing her. She has never been attacked on the street.
The experience is not unique to her. As the world observes 16 days (November 25 to December 11) of activism to end violence against women, surveys confirm that home is the scariest place in South Africa for women and children.
The Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation found from inquest files in Johannesburg that women are at a “much greater risk of being murdered by husbands than by strangers”. The pattern appears to be the same on a national level, said Lisa Vetten, who is conducting the surveys.
The inquest dockets, according to Vetten, indicate that 56% of women who die of other than natural causes are killed by their husbands. More South African women die at the hands of male friends and partners than in accidents or street violence. In Gauteng, at least one woman is killed by a partner every week.
Police statistics show that rape is the only major crime that is increasing in South Africa. Most rapists are known to the victims, surveys show.
Fakir, who is in the process of divorcing the abusive husband she put up with since 1983, says: “When going to work I used to walk through a bush patch where there were lots of rapes, but I dreaded going home more than anything.”
She claims her husband forced her into having sex at one stage while she was pregnant with their first-born.
Sometime in 1994, during the first holy days before Ramadan, Fakir’s husband smacked her so hard she fell off the chair. When her 14-year-old son by a former marriage tried to intervene, her husband punched her son repeatedly with his fists. Her husband, who usually reacted violently on the slightest provocation, once choked her severely on her birthday.
One night when her husband was working a night shift, he stopped briefly at their home and knocked on a window. He told her to call the army – “not the police” – if she wanted to remain alive, because he intended to kill her the next morning.
Fakir didn’t want to become another statistic. Before dawn she took her children and sought sanctuary at a shelter.
The surveys highlight just how much violence is perpetrated against women and children, but this is overshadowed by large numbers of media reports about street violence and crime by strangers.
“People feel home is a sacred area and use this as an excuse not to report family violence,” says Zubeda Dangor, director of the Nisaa Institute for Women’s Development.
While apartheid has played a major role in fanning a culture of violence against women and children, Dangor said South Africa’s society needs to dismantle patriarchy and “the systematic oppression of women. The process of democracy and transformation in South Africa needs to filter down to homes.”
The director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Graeme Simpson, described some homes as torture chambers. He called for the retraining of police as a way to strengthen intervention measures. He said police usually do not know how to handle cases of spouse abuse, which often lead to murder.