Most rape victims are women, and that male victims are often erased from collective recognition. Photo: Rajesh Jantilal/AFP
Sexual violence continues unabated in South Africa. While the resulting increase in public discussion about it must be welcomed, the language in which we couch sexual violence must also be interrogated. There is a danger that popular “rape talk” may function as a straitjacket that imprisons the victim/survivor in an image of “damaged goods” and the perpetrator in an image of a sub-human “monster”.
As we mark International Women’s Day on 8 March, let us consider these dangers in turn. Before we do so, we want to acknowledge that most rape victims are women, and that male victims of rape are often erased from collective recognition and unfairly prevented from accessing the support they need.
‘Damaged goods’
For the victim-survivor of rape, there is often the unspoken assumption that s/he will (even must) feel psychologically broken and ashamed to the extent that s/he feels “damaged, dishonoured, less than”, as Thordis Elva remarked in her conversation with Tom Stranger at TEDWomen in 2016. There are at least two elements to this notion of “damaged goods” that are potentially detrimental to survivors’ healing and the reparation of their sense of agency. They are the intertwined elements of shame and victim blaming.
In Rape: A South African Nightmare, author and academic Pumla Dineo Gqola quotes Kenyan feminist activist Shailja Patel who writes that “if you want to understand how power works in any society, watch who is carrying the shame and who is doing the shaming”. Gqola concludes from this that shame acts as a tool of oppression by showing who is valued and who is invisibilised in society.
Moreover, she argues that shame is the “product of dehumanisation, and all systems of violent oppressive power produce shame in those they brutalise”. Given the oppressiveness of a patriarchal society that brutalises women routinely, it is no wonder many victims feel ashamed.
Philosopher and survivor Susan Brison explains in Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self that she did not want anyone to know she had been sexually assaulted and “in spite of my conviction that I had done nothing wrong, I felt ashamed”. Similarly, in I’m the Girl Who Was Raped, Michelle Hattingh writes after being raped: “Even though the feminist inside of me screamed against it, I felt defiled. I felt dirty, unclean and unwanted”.
Given the ubiquity of shame-filled responses by survivors of sexual assault, German academic Mithu Sanyal worries about the dominant discourse on rape. She argues in Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo that it risks presenting shame as a type of “automatic body reflex, like an itch or a sneeze, rather than a culturally learned and highly complex emotion”.
Patriarchal meanings again and again return the shame of rape to the victim’s body — rape supposedly marks a woman’s body as degraded, blemished, impure and damaged. Clearly, this kind of social scripting ties a victim up in a straitjacket from where it is particularly hard to regain a sense of one’s sexual personhood, to experience erotic joy and pleasure, and to participate freely and autonomously with the world again.
The idea of victimhood as entailing ‘damaged goods’ also links with the idea of victim blaming, that is, with the tacit, mistaken idea that the victim could have and should have kept herself safe. Another way in which women have historically been blamed and shamed, is of course, that she invited sexual assault with the clothes she wore or by being drunk and so forth, — that is, that she somehow presented herself as a sexual being. This is the more classic case of slut-shaming and victim-blaming, that has been written about extensively by feminists.
Susan Brison proposes that as a society we perhaps blame the victim to assure ourselves that we would never become victims ourselves. She further writes: “How many of us have swallowed the potentially lethal lie that if you don’t do anything wrong, if you’re just careful enough, you’ll be safe? How many of us have believed its damaging victim-blaming corollary: if you are attacked, it’s because you did something wrong?”.
Similarly, Hattingh writes that in the immediate aftermath of her rape, she wanted her mother to tell her that it is not her fault that she was raped. At both the police and the hospital, she and her friend were treated as blameworthy: “We were the girls who were stupid enough to get raped. And we were treated as such.”
But how can we practically shift the shame/blame for rape from the victim to the perpetrator?
We argue that the public discourse must be changed so that the shame caused by rape shifts from the victim to the perpetrator. Note the stark contrast between the internalised shame above and the collective public activism that Igbo women of West Africa call “sitting on a man”.
This is a traditional practice whereby women would collectively sanction a man for, among others, mistreating his wife. The practice entailed that the women of the village would metaphorically “sit on” or “make war on” a man by gathering at this compound, and singing, shouting, banging on his door, and generally following him around, loudly proclaiming his misdeeds, irritating and humiliating him, until he repents and promises to mend his ways.
‘Monstrous perpetrators’
The “monstrous perpetrator” narrative vilifies the rapist as “a monster — inhuman” to the extent that he is cast as an anomaly, banished from society, and viewed as beyond social redemption into perpetuity. We argue that society instead needs to find ways of talking about rapists that, paradoxically, humanises them. Given that many rapists exist in our families and societies, we propose that trying to banish them often comes close to denying their existence. There must be better ways to think and talk about and to them, and to make sense of their actions that arise out of our collective existence.
Mithu Sanyal comments that dealing with perpetrators “seems to be an even bigger taboo than all the other loaded questions around the minefield that is rape”. If the message is that only evil men rape, then men who do rape, but do not regard themselves as evil, might literally be unable to identify themselves as rapists.
A full 20 years after Tom Stranger had raped Thordis Elva, they co-authored South of Forgiveness: A True Story of Rape and Responsibility after appearing at TED Women in 2016. Controversy immediately surrounded the book and the talk, with opposition coming mostly from feminist groups accusing Elva of being a rape apologist.
Speaking at the event, Stranger describes how, when he was trying to make sense of what he had done, and prior to Elva contacting him, he drew heavily on elements of his life as “a surfer, a social science student, a friend to good people, a loved brother and son” to construct his concept of himself as a good person, who could not have raped Elva. Yet, he knew deep down that he had done something immeasurably wrong.
He says: “I gripped tight to the simple notion that I wasn’t a bad person … It took me a long time to stare down this dark corner of myself, and to ask it questions.”
In his internal struggle, we see the disbelief that he could be a rapist. Rapists are monsters and he is not a monster and so what he had done, could not be rape. If we “rehumanise” rapists, as ordinary “good” (in other aspects of their lives) guys who are (also) loved members of families and friendship groups, perhaps more men would be willing to “stare down” the “dark corner” of themselves and to ask it questions. Such a willingness to question oneself is a first step towards taking greater responsibility for one’s sexual activities.
Let’s remind ourselves that how we talk about rape must allow for more honest and potentially more transformative reimaginations of agency, shame, victimhood, harm, accountability and recovery after rape.
Louise du Toit is a professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University and Charla Smit is a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the philosophy department.