dollar
Liesl Gerntholtz and Shireen Motara
RIGHT TO REPLY
During the past year there has been an intensified debate in the media about rape. Whether this is because rape has reached such proportions that we can no longer ignore it, or because the media has become more responsive to the issue, is not clear.
Whatever the reasons are, the transparency around such a critical issue should be welcomed because it can achieve two important objectives.
Firstly, it brings into the public arena an issue which has often been considered taboo in society. Secondly, it has the ability to inform and educate broader society about the issue and the implications it has for achieving gender equality in South Africa.
In this regard the contribution by Charlene Smith must be acknowledged. As a rape survivor who is able to speak out about her experience, she has made a substantial contribution, and one cannot help but admire the courage with which she has faced her ordeal.
As a journalist, Smith has also been fortunate enough to have access to the media to speak about issues relating to rape in South Africa. These include possible punishment for rapists, the provision of AZT for rape survivors and the role of NGOs working in this area.
As a journalist she is also able to articulate her experiences and concerns, unlike the majority of rape survivors who are not able to do so.
However, Smith’s recent remarks have raised a number of serious concerns which we believe cannot be left unchallenged. More specifically, her comments about anti-rape organisations and her views that rape is not about power but about ”fun” has left us wondering what or who exactly the source of Smith’s information is.
In coming to her conclusion that anti- rape organisations ”are not thinking strategically about rape because they are focussing on ego and the donor dollar”, Smith has chosen to ignore the broad socio- political context within which violence against women in South Africa takes place and within which many NGOs operate.
She ignores that, by and large, despite the international recognition given to the problem of violence against women, it is NGOs that are primarily engaged in the work of finding strategies and combating gender violence.
Margaret Schuler, editor of Freedom from Violence: Women’s Strategies from around the World, notes that ”Through their commitment and creativity they [NGOs] have brought the realities of gender violence to the light of day and have crafted responses that confront its concrete ugliness as rape or battery or female infanticide or any of the other forms it takes”. This is particularly true in South Africa where it has taken the state many years to acknowledge the plight of survivors of violence.
Smith’s criticism also has the potential to negate and trivialise the critical work done by these organisations.
The work carried out by NGOs is often done with very little financial and other resources from government. Consequently, their dependence on donor funding and donations, and their very limited capacity means that they cannot do much more than provide support and information services to rape survivors. This limited capacity often prevents them from engaging in debates through the media, unlike Smith whose job it is to do so.
The immediate needs of survivors also means that NGOs do not have time and resources to engage in political work, like lobbying and advocacy – which are much needed in the struggle to transform society’s and the judiciary’s attitude towards the crime of rape and towards rape survivors themselves. As a result we do not see many of them participating and engaging with these issues in the public arena.
Indeed, it is the establishment of organisations like the Centre for Applied Legal Studies Gender Research Project and Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre to end violence against women in the mid-1990s, which have provided this kind of support to anti-rape organisations. One would think that if they had to make a choice between helping women and defending themselves against unwarranted and unfair criticism the choice would be obvious.
Smith also accuses NGOs of ”mythologising” rape when they say that rape is about power. In disputing this statement, she suggests that the majority of rapists rape for ”fun”. It is not clear on what basis she comes to this conclusion, but it flies in the face of research that has been conducted about why men rape.
Many feminist and non-feminist writers agree that an understanding of gender violence must include an understanding that ”gender violence is embedded in the context of cultural, socio-economic, and political power relations”.
How Smith fails to recognise that – ”men who usually operate together and will split into teams and rape the best looking woman they can find” do so on the basis that they wield a certain amount of power in society and hold a form of status not enjoyed by women – is beyond our comprehension. Ultimately all of this translates into and perpetuates the kind of power relations which exist between men and women in this country, and across the world.
We would like to caution Smith against the kinds of views she has solicited recently.
Her comments about NGOs are particularly problematic as they have the potential of influencing the public to believe that women’s organisations are only doing what they do for reasons of self-interest.
She should also bear in mind that her experience of rape only represents, in many respects, one kind of experience – a white middle class experience. In this regard, her views are disempowering of other rape survivors and tend to undermine the many organisations and individuals that have been working in this field for a substantial period of time.
She tends to present her experience as the definitive one which qualifies her both as an expert on rape and enables her to determine the issues and priorities for all rape survivors.
This is of serious concern to us because it could conceal the experiences of black women as rape survivors, whose circumstances are very different from Smith’s.
As feminist author bell hooks so rightly states, ”While it is evident that many women suffer from sexist tyranny, there is little indication that this forges ‘a common bond among all women’. There is much evidence substantiating the reality that race and class identity creates differences in quality of life, social status, and lifestyle that take precedence over the common experience women share – differences which are rarely transcended.”
Liesl Gerntholtz and Shireen Motara work in the legal department of the Commission on Gender Equality. They express these views in their personal capacity.