Charlene Smith
CROSSFIRE
TV presenter Tracey Going is porcelain-doll pretty, and it was those looks film-maker Richard Latham threatened to destroy when he beat her up two-and-a-half years ago.
This week Latham, a millionaire and recovering crack addict, was sentenced to a R5E000 fine or one year in jail suspended for five years for beating up Going – her eyes were closed shut from his punches, her head was injured from where he pounded it on the floor, and her body was marred with bruises from kicks and punches.
Women and men demonstrating against domestic violence outside the court displayed the names of women beaten to death by their partners – as will happen once every six days in Gauteng. Signs told of women beaten to death with pick handles for refusing to have sex, mothers shot with their children, women murdered by husbands or boyfriends who were police officers, young girls and elderly women raped and murdered, and one 15-year-old decapitated, her limbs amputated and her foetus cut out of her body by the farmer who fathered the baby. And it was important that this was not an all-female demonstration.
The judgment was the first high-profile deliberation since the much-touted new legislation against domestic violence came into effect – and it showed how useless words on paper are if the criminal justice system has not been trained to either implement or be sensitive to them.
Even before the new domestic violence legislation came into place, police at the special task unit, which also investigates rape and child abuse, warned they did not have enough officers or resources – there has been no addition of resources or officers to their ranks to help them cope.
Home is where most children will get raped or abused; it is where 60% of women will get raped and most often where women will be murdered.
And South African legislation still enshrines the remarkable precept that if a perpetrator was drunk or drugged, his or her incapacity leads to a reduced sentence. How can this be? Surely criminality begins with excessive alcohol consumption or drug- taking?
At his last court appearance in January, Latham, who skipped South Africa for a year after being charged and was arrested in Zimbabwe, showed no remorse. He talked in drug slang of getting ”whacked”. He said he had lied at previous hearings where he denied drug use because his then attorney, Billy Gundelfinger, ”advised me that my drug abuse was not relevant”. He sneered at the female prosecutor, saying, ”if I wanted a wife, I’d buy a wife”.
He agreed he had a history of becoming aggressive when drugged and that he had ”shaken” a previous girlfriend: ”I suppose that’s what an addiction is about -it’s about not being able to control something.” Which is a fat lot of consolation when an out-of-control person has beaten you to a pulp. And it was clear from evidence that Latham was neither drunk nor drugged when he assaulted Going.
In Living between Danger and Love by Kathleen B Jones, published in the United States in January this year, Andre English- Howard, a US college student and crack addict who murdered his girlfriend, Andrea O’Donnell, a beautiful and successful A- grade student, feminist and self defence instructor, noted under hypnosis: ”I always control my relationships … I find women who need something, who are insecure or don’t think they’re pretty, or something like that. I find a fault. And then I cater to the fault and make them feel good, loved, and then I get bored and I sabotage it.”
What was O’Donnell’s flaw? ”At first she seemed like a person who had it all together, was motivated and focussed. But she had a fear of being left. She was scared someone was going to use her and leave her, so she made a point that she was going to get with someone she loved and work it out, no matter what happened.”
So determined was Andrea to make it work that when Andre began strangling her, she did not fight back, as she was trained to do. She just said, ”You’re hurting me,” and died.
Tracey Going’s discernible flaw is that she is a public figure, at all times she presents a carefully groomed, carefully controlled public persona. But that is to assume that men who beat women are never flawed in their judgments – Going took the most difficult decision a public figure can take, to open herself up to public scrutiny and charge the man who beat her.
Her mother never took action against her wife-beating father. Going decided to stop the cycle. What a shame the criminal justice system was unable to support her, because while the court was at pains to ensure Latham continues rehabilitation for drug addiction, no attempt was made to ensure that he learn how to control violent impulses toward women.
And after two-and-a-half years of sitting in lonely, gloomy courts, Going gets to sit under the arc lights of a television studio and carry on smiling as though nothing has happened.