OnSpecial Assignmenton February 21, producer Adel van Niekerk looks at rape in South Africa. We interviewedProf Farid Esack,the head of the department of Religion studies at UJ, about his views on rape and our society. He also worked on the domestic violence act as a commissioner for gender equality. See parts of the full interview below: “It’s inevitable, even in the case in India, all of these moral outrages have a very limited shelf value. It is important that when there is a particularly dramatic or brutal expression of violence against woman, that people get sufficiently worked up and taken to the streets and everyone feels obliged to get in on the act, including politicians as we have seen in Anene Booysen’s funeral and as we have seen in India …but all public outrages of this kind they inevitably have a short shelf life.” “The one difficulty that I have had with the response of Anene Booysen is that a number of the responses were very violent responses. The imagery fro example of a war on rape, the minister of children women and disabilities demanding that there should be no bail for those being accused of rape because they are animals. All of this is in many ways undermines what we are really busy with – the crime of rape, the crime of violence against women are some dimensions of the brutalisation of human life, the cheapening of human life, the destruction of the sacredness of human life. So when we talk about war, when we talk about withholding rights of other people. When we talk about ‘just kill the rapist’, all of this in some ways reinforces a cycle that works against the rule of law, that works against what the larger project ought to be and that is to again instil in everybody is a sense of the sacredness of all of human life.” “I do not deny that at the moment there is a particular male problem and that women are at the receiving end of this male problem. The way in which we construct masculinities, the way in which we, until this particular government introduced new laws on sexual offences, introduced the domestic violence act. In many ways women were criminalised themselves for the violence perpetrated against them. So even though I speak about a large respect for human life, this does not mean I do not acknowledge a particular problem. A problem of gender violence, a problem of rape against women, but at the heart of this is another problem and this is constructions of maleness and masculinity.” “On the whole, society has become immune to all of this. Society is indifferent to it. At times when the crime is as brutal as the Anene Booysen crime, it’s only then where one sees society getting really hyped up about it. But a very large part of society still discourages women from going to report rape. A large part of our society still regards women who have been raped as having asked for it. So we have these outbursts of moral outrage, and on the other hand “oh gosh did she ask for it’, and women of-course having to walk around with the double shame. The one the act of rape against then and the accusing eyes of society around them.” “South Africa has the most progressive acts and laws on gender violence. So I don’t see any significant scope for the law to be amended. Much more needs to be done on the training of magistrates, and the education of police people…it is at these levels where things are ignored…at a legal level there is not more that can be done to improve things as far as rape is concerned.” “The commonness of women being reduced to sexual objects, in our jokes…all of that means that given an opportunity , if nobody is really looking that very many of those men are capable of becoming rapists…this is not saying that all men are evil…evil is far more common than we think, the potential towards evil exists in all of us. That’s why we need civil society to get in and help shift the consciousness of society as a whole but particularly the consciousness of men.” “Our society is a far more brutal society that many other societies…the Anene Booysen case was a particularly gruesome rape…when you are frustrated and don’t have a moral sense, you turn on the weakest and vulnerable. Anene Booysen was this weak link and then there was this pack of people – deeply problematic people. They go for the weak.” “One thing I am convinced would not work…the death penalty – this contributes to the dehumanisation to all life…correctional services contributes further to the criminalisation of individuals…all these violent tendencies get actualised once they are in prison…I do think the kind of interventions that work on rape and gender violence like Sonke, rape crisis…that is our best hop e in working with these men…and the simple improvement of the economic lives of these people…huge problem in SA is the disparities between wealth and poverty…very marked in the rural areas…lack of social cohesion in our society.”
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