A report released recently shows that Johannesburg women have accepted sexual abuse as the norm
Brenda Atkinson
Young women in greater Johannesburg’s Southern Metropolitan Local Council (SMLC) have internalised their daily risk of sexual assault to the extent that most do not even consider forced sex to fall within the definition of sexual violence.
This is one of the findings of a research report on sexual violence in the SMLC region released on Tuesday by Community Information Empowerment and Transparency foundation CIETafrica and the SMLC authority.
Three years in the making, the report’s findings were presented in Johannesburg at a gathering attended by women, men, and school-going youth assembled to discuss effective strategies for the prevention of sexual violence in the most heavily populated and under-resourced region in South Africa.
Accounting for an estimated 40% of the population of greater Johannesburg, the SMLC area stretches from Johannesburg’s central business district in the north through to the rural squatter communities of Orange Farm in the south, and from Soweto and Eldorado Park in the west through to City Deep in the east. It covers 567km2.
The region is in many ways a geo-social microcosm of post-apartheid South Africa, a collection of accidental “communities” hastily patched together or slowly agglomerated in response to the arbitrary “relocations” of the apartheid state.
But, of course, apartheid was never arbitrary, and its strategic brutalisation of family structures and real community networks achieved what it wanted, and more: impoverished areas in which the brutalised rule through terror. As Farid Esack, keynote speaker and member of the Commission on Gender Equality, said at the conference, you cannot expect yesterday’s teenage agents of ungovernability to become tomorrow’s civic-minded citizens.
What CIETafrica and the SMLC set out to discover in 1997 was not just the extent of sexual violence in this area, but the basis of gender discrimination and, within that, instances of “resilience” on which to build effective counter-strategies.
The research report defines “resilience” as those factors that distinguish men who do not rape from those who do. The more complicated research task was to understand the resilience of men who do not rape, and to find out what could be done to build on that resilience.
The results of the report – funded in part by the Canadian International Development Research Centre, and including questionnaires, focus groups and experiential theatre forums with over 26 000 high school youth, as well as thousands of adult men and women – show a disturbing generational clustering of discriminatory attitudes among youth.
These attitudes are disturbing, in particular, because they are not confined to young men: where eight out of 10 young men said women were responsible or partly responsible for causing sexual violence, more than half of female youth also said that women were partly responsible for sexual violence. Twelve per cent of young women believed they had no right to avoid sexual abuse, and more than half of the youth interviewed – both male and female – believe that forcing sex with someone you know does not constitute sexual violence. They simply consider it to be “rough sex”.
Both women and girls among those in focus groups considered sexual violence to be proof of a man’s love and attention, to the extent that the absence of such violence was regarded as loss of interest by the man concerned.
The report also explores the murky terrain of “jackrolling” (recreational gang rape). The question on the self- administered, anonymous questionnaire asks: “Is jackrolling, magintsa, or gang rape cool?” Although approval of jackrolling is minor compared to support of other forms of sexual violence, 11% of 15-year-old males said they thought it was cool. Four per cent of young girls thought it was cool too.
One CIET fieldworker who attended the sentencing on June 19 of 10 Westbury men convicted of gang-raping a 13-year-old girl five years ago said both the mothers and fathers of the convicted men held the girl responsible for the rape. She also said that those women who do condone jackrolling see it as part of a sexual economy in which sexual acquiescence buys clothes and other status trappings.
Going against the grain of common wisdom about rape, the CIET report did not find a correlation between unemployment and sexual violence among adult men.
What it did find was that women without an independent income were more likely to excuse and tolerate sexual violence from male providers. Two out of three women interviewed said economic adversity might force a woman to accept abuse, and almost half said economic hardship might cause a woman to allow her daughter to be abused.
What the CIET report’s 100-page research document finds is that young girls and women have adapted to a vicious combination of political fallout, historical disempowerment and economic hardship by developing a set of attitudes and beliefs about sexual violence that allow them to see themselves as survivors.
Professor Neil Andersson, CIET founder and executive director, sees these survival mechanisms as similar to those engaged by people in profound mourning: denial, anger, blame and acceptance are perverted into a potent form of suppressed rage and pain. And this in a context in which there are few avenues for expression, let alone the opportunity to develop an own lexicon, a language for describing and protesting against the abuses that continue to go on.