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Shifting Meanings of Postconflict Sexual Violence
in South Africa
The phenomenon of exceptionally high levels of sexual violence in con-
temporary South Africa is a complex issue and is still poorly under-
stood. South Africa has the highest levels of rape for any country not
at war ðWood and Jewkes 2005Þ, and in pure numbers it far exceeds some
war contexts.
1
Annually, up to sixty-five thousand rapes are filed by the
South African Police Service, and these numbers seem to have increased
steadily since the 1990s ðHoltmann and Domingo-Swarts 2008, 108–10Þ.
2
In 1999 the South African Law Reform Commission estimated that the
police figures of around fifty-five thousand should translate into approxi-
mately 1.6 million actual rapes a year, in light of the low report rate ðSouth
African Law Commission 1999Þ. About 40 percent of reported instances
concern victims younger than eighteen years of age, and 15 percent of all
reported cases involve victims under age twelve ðJewkes, Abraham, and
Mathews 2009Þ.
3
About 84 percent of child rapes and 52 percent of adult
rapes involve perpetrators known to the victims ðSeedat et al. 2009Þ.We
do not have a proper record of male rape victim numbers.
4
If we have a
1
For instance, during the Bosnian war year of 1992, in the context of an explicit em-
ployment of systemic rape for genocidal purposes, about twenty thousand Muslim women
and girls were raped by Serbian soldiers ðSimons 2001Þ, as opposed to South Africa’s peace-
time annual figure of close to sixty-five thousand.
2
Although this article focuses on the postapartheid period, it should not be read as im-
plying that the high rape levels only emerged after democratization. At most we can surmise
that democratic conditions did nothing to address the steady increase of already exceptional
figures.
3
Naeemah Abrahams and her coauthors ð2012Þreport that rape homicide was sus-
pected in 11 percent of intimate partner femicides and 28 percent of nonintimate femicides
in 2009; in the case of murder, rape is normally not charged. The term “rape victim” can
therefore not simply be replaced with “rape survivor.”
4
This is mainly because the legal definition of rape only changed in 2007 with the
promulgation of the South African Sexual Offences Amendment Act to include male rape
victims and female perpetrators. See http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction
?id577866. Another emerging problem is that of so-called corrective rapes aimed against
homosexuals of both sexes.
I would like to thank Vasti Roodt and Azille Coetzee of Stellenbosch University and
Miranda Outman-Kramer of Signs for their critical comments. The South African National
Research Foundation supplied financial support for this research.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2014, vol. 40, no. 1]
© 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2014/4001-0013$10.00
Louise du Toit
profile similar to the United States in this respect, male victims should
make up about 7 percent of all rape victims, and male perpetrators would
be more than 99 percent of all perpetrators ðGreenfeld 1997; Stemple
2009, 606–7Þ. Moreover, male rape victims are typically feminized in and
through rape by men who identify as heterosexual ðStemple 2009, 611Þ.
Rape thus remains a highly gendered crime.
In this article, I present four interpretive frames that can be or have been
applied in this situation in an attempt to make sense of the statistics. The
typology I employ distinguishes four interpretive frames: first, past per-
petrator trauma; second, current social exclusion; third, patriarchal poli-
tics; and finally, ontological violence. The four frames differ significantly
from one another. The first two, for instance, are much more prevalent
than the third and are often encountered in academia, the media, and pop-
ular discourse. The third I regard as a minority academic position, while the
fourth is a barely emerging frame for understanding rape in South Africa.
The four frames do not offer watertight categories, and several present
with overlapping themes. The first aim of this article is to sketch the four
interpretive frames as a rough heuristic tool. The second aim is to critique
each of the frames in terms of its adequacy as an explanation or interpre-
tation of the phenomenon and also in terms of its likely effect in and on
society as a whole. Thus, I look at the assumptions and implications tied up
with each frame. In particular, I investigate to what extent they may feed
social tolerance of rape. The backdrop to this critical investigation remains
the urgent need to eradicate rape, in line with Catharine MacKinnon’s plea
that “what ½womenneed is change: for men to stop hurting them and
using them because they are women, and for everyone else to stop letting
them do it because they are men” ðMacKinnon 2005, 124Þ.
Past perpetrator trauma
The past-perpetrator-trauma interpretation of rape emerged in response
to the consistently high and even escalating rape figures in South Africa
after the political transition from apartheid to democracy. This frame rep-
resents an important improvement over the commonplace trivialization
of rape that preceeded it. The original position typically denies that rape
takes place on a large scale, denies that many men are involved, denies that
it poses a threat to democracy, denies its devastating effects on victims,
naturalizes rapist behavior in men, and blames the victims rather than the
perpetrators. The past-perpetrator-trauma frame is an improvement on
such responses because it locates the problem of rape with the perpetra-
tors, it denaturalizes the phenomenon by looking for exceptional circum-
stances that lead to these high levels, and it offers a systemic explanation
102 yDu Toit
that acknowledges the social dimension of rape and does not relegate it
to the private sphere.
5
The need for a more systemic understanding of
rape was underscored by the notable SA Medical Research Council study
ðJewkes et al. 2009Þ, which revealed that about one-third of South Afri-
can men have committed rape at least once, with half of those men saying
they have raped more than once.
6
The past-perpetrator-trauma frame offers a causal explanation for the
sexual violence in the country, couching it in predominantly psychological
language. According to this understanding, it is not normal or natural for
men to engage in sexual violence whenever they calculate that they can get
away with it, and thus it searches for causes that have brought about this
unnatural behavior in such a large percentage of South African men. This
kind of discourse usually picks up on terms such as “masculinities in cri-
sis,” “colonial emasculation,” “precarious masculine identities,” and “dam-
aged psyches” ðsee also Moffett 2006, 136Þin an attempt to explain rape.
The argument has it that either colonial oppression or the liberation strug-
gle or both have damaged previously colonized men to the extent that
they have been symbolically castrated. It is the lingering effect of this deep
psychological scarring that is still playing itself out in the high levels of sex-
ual violence that we see ðHamber 2007, 385Þ. The assumption here seems
to be that men assert and perform their masculinity almost compulsively
through sexual violence in an attempt ðwhether misguided or notÞto heal
their sense of themselves as damaged or incomplete men. Otherwise it is
employed less self-consciously as merely an irrational manifestation or symp-
tom of a psychological disease infecting a large proportion of the nation’s
men, a kind of acting out of posttraumatic stress disorder. American theo-
rist Greg Thomas adds depth to this kind of interpretation when he draws
on Frantz Fanon to explain that the revolt of the colonized is likely to take
an erotic form: “the ecstacy of revolt,” the “accumulated libido” drives the
liberation ðThomas 2007, 100Þ, not because the colonized are in fact hy-
persexual but because of the white sexual neurosis that infused the colo-
nial project from the start. Black persons within the colonial project sym-
5
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, which was largely respon-
sible for facilitating reconciliation in the country, set the tone for the privatization of rape
when it failed to include sexual violence and rape as “gross human rights violations” about
which people were invited to testify to the Commission ðsee Promotion of National Unity
and Reconciliation Act no. 34 of 1995; http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/1995
-034.pdf Þ. This also reinforced the notion that national reconciliation did not need a political
reconciliation between the sexes but only between the races ðsee Du Toit 2009, 15Þ.
6
The method described in the study shows that this figure is representative of the male
population in South Africa except for age: the population interviewed was somewhat younger
than the national average.
S I G N S Autumn 2014 y103
bolize for whites “the sexual instinct ðin its raw stateÞ,” which means white
colonial sexuality is thoroughly conditioned by “the psycho-pathology of
Negrophobia” ðThomas 2007, 88Þ.
Critique of the past-perpetrator-trauma interpretive frame
In positive terms, as I have noted above, this frame improves vastly on
stories about rape that deny that rape is a pervasive social or systemic prob-
lem and that it entails extensive damage to the victim.
Yet insofar as this interpretive frame aims to give a causal explanation
for the widespread phenomenon of sexual violence, it encounters a prob-
lem with the available facts. The first of these is that rape figures are not
declining, twenty years after political liberation, but may actually be ris-
ing.
7
Second, the average age of rape offenders has remained fairly con-
stant, between twenty and forty years of age ðJewkes et al. 2009Þ. If the
main causes of current sexual violence were so clearly locatable in a bounded
past that produced damaged masculinities, then one would expect that
nearly twenty years of a new dispensation would at least start to positively
affect the trends. One must assume a gradual demilitarization of South Af-
rican men under peaceful conditions, and the damages specifically done to
black men’s self-esteem should also start to lift since and due to the suc-
cessful political transition. Quite simply, the hypermasculine or emasculated
men produced by the liberation struggle and colonial oppression, who were
psychologically predisposed to rape, should by now be rapidly aging. This
interpretive frame may have carried more weight a decade or more ago; it
now stands in need of either replacement or supplementation, because on
its own it no longer convinces.
This frame also strongly tends to “other” rapists and to distance the
problem from mainstream society, denying wider social or political com-
plicity with the rapist’s behavior or perspective. It does so first through a
racial aspect: the frame implies that rapists are likely to be black ðin the
broad senseÞmen from the historically oppressed groups. This frame thus
allows for the white perpetrator to quietly evade scrutiny while it selects
black male sexuality for problematization in ways that are reminiscent of
the colonial project itself.
8
7
The expectation that rape levels must come down as the society gradually normalizes
after the oppression of apartheid and the disruptions of the liberation struggle is confirmed by
the steady decrease in the rates of most of the other serious crimes, including femicide
ðMoffett 2006, 131–32Þ.
8
If one were to focus on the militarization of our society during the struggle rather than
on colonialism as such, white men also “qualify” as potential rapists, since a whole generation
104 yDu Toit
The tendency to “other” rape in terms of race ðor another category
such as culture or classÞoften leads to its being hijacked for other politi-
cal agendas that have nothing to do with sexual violence. A further aspect
of the othering tendency of this frame is that it disproportionately blames
the veterans of the liberation struggle—a group already marginalized in the
new dispensation ðHamber 2007, 383Þ. In her study of war, Joanna Bourke
ð1999Þmoreover claims that war veterans are typically not excessively vio-
lent upon their return to civilian life. Whatever category of men we single
out for blame within this frame, the problem remains that such historical
explanations are eroded by the statistics over the past twenty years.
A further problem with this frame is that the colonial injury story does
not adequately account for psychosexual damage on the side of colonized
women. In other words, this frame has trouble explaining the highly gen-
dered nature of the violence that it identifies as a symptom of prior op-
pression since the oppression was not limited to one gender. Saartjie
Baartman’s name could serve as shorthand to remind us that the colo-
nized woman was also deeply injured in her whole being, including her
sense of sexual self ðsee Thomas 2007, 89Þ, and there is ample evidence
that women fought alongside men in the South African as in other Afri-
can liberation struggles.
9
The strange asymmetry between an emasculated
man whose injury translates into war levels of sexual violence twenty years
after liberation and a sexually injured or castrated woman whose similar
injury leaves no visible trace remains a central puzzle that this frame seems
incapable of solving. What makes the gendered asymmetry even more puz-
zling, not to say disturbing, is the fact that most sexual violence has a strongly
intracommunal profile ðOrkin 2000, 12Þ. This means that the perpetrators
of rape in South Africa usually aim their violence at the women and girls clos-
est to them—the very women who would have undergone the same co-
9
A poignant reminder of the fact that South African women also fought for liberation and
that the oppression often took a sexual form is an artwork by Judith Mason that hangs in the
Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, titled The Man Who Sang and the Woman Who Kept
Silent 2. Mason created the work in commemoration of Phila Ndwandwe, who was shot by
security police after being held captive for weeks. She remained silent throughout her in-
terrogation and paid with her life. The work consists of a blue dress made from plastic bags.
Held naked, Nwandwe made panties for herself out of a discarded blue plastic bag. She was
subsequently buried in these. For a discussion, see Sachs ð2009, vi–viiiÞ.
of them were systematically militarized through conscription by the apartheid regime. If the
focus is on this aspect of the past rather than on colonial oppression, then the hypermascu-
linity of military culture is portrayed as the cause of damaged psyches rather than what is in a
sense its opposite: emasculation. Yet both tend to use psychological vocabularies that point to
a form of gendered psychological damage.
S I G N S Autumn 2014 y105
lonial oppression, the same disruptions caused by the struggle, and the same
self-alienation due to colonial and even postcolonial rule.
A further objection to this frame is that, even as it others the rapist, it
nevertheless manages to foreground or create sympathy for the rapist’s
perspective. The reader of this frame is invited to adopt the assumed per-
spective of the perpetrator. Moreover, his likely motivations or drives are
anchored in the historic trauma and gradual recovery of his nation. In stark
contrast, the rape victim remains a purely private, anonymous, ahistori-
cal, and shadowy figure, mere collateral damage. Although the meaning
of rape cannot be adequately understood without taking the perspective
and understanding of the perpetrator into account, this perspective should
not be allowed to dominate the interpretation to the point of erasing the
experience of the victim altogether. By way of illustration, one can point
to the fact that in Rachel Jewkes et al.’s 2009 study, a total of almost
20 percent of the men interviewed admitted to having been involved in
gang rape, either as participants or as spectators, and of those who had
been so involved, almost half expressed the conviction that gang rape is a
kind of “game” ðJewkes et al. 2009, 26Þ. While it is clearly important to
take note of this perspective of many male perpetrators, it cannot be left
standing as the definitive meaning of the event. It is inconceivable that any
victim of gang rape would appreciate the game aspect of the violent at-
tack, and therefore it is crucial that we account for the perspectives of
both perpetrators and victims—perspectives that are likely to be each oth-
er’s inverse. Thus, although we need to understand all factors that play
a role in either causing or facilitating sexual violence, there is a real dan-
ger that we will reduce the meaning of rape to a presumed cause, located
within the conscious or subconscious mind and motives of the perpetra-
tor, and will thereby erase the experience of the victim from our under-
standing of the phenomenon itself.
The sixth and final point of critique to raise in response to this rather
dominant framing of sexual violence is that, tightly interwoven with or as
a result of its simultaneous othering of rape and adoption of the rapist’s
perspective, it works to excuse the perpetrator of rape, to evoke pity for
him. The logic of this frame lets the perpetrator arrive on the scene of rape
a deeply wounded creature. The predominance of psychological and med-
ical vocabulary such as “trauma,” “emasculation,” and “epidemic of sex-
ual violence” reinforces the idea that rape should above all be understood
in terms of the presumed psychological pain and injury of the perpetra-
tor. This approach clearly risks losing from view the fact that in the situ-
ation of rape he is inflicting fresh and unjustifiable trauma on an innocent
106 yDu Toit
other. Framing the violence of rape in terms of a symptom furthermore
tends to depersonalize the perpetrator, to view his sexual violence as a
quasi-natural force ðunleashed by insufficiently careful women and girlsÞ,
and all of this works together to underplay the human and moral agency,
and ultimately the accountability, of the rapist. Now aspects of the naive, triv-
ializing response I identified as preceding the past-perpetrator-trauma frame
return to haunt this frame. Once again, we see, but this time under the
banner of perpetrator trauma, a return of the tendency to blame the victim
and excuse the perpetrator and to naturalize male sexual violence under
the aspect of psychological illness. Why is it so intuitive that men who are
injured psychologically will engage in sexual violence toward women and
girls? There is a central question here that is seldom raised: why and how
does the supposed masculine injury translate into sexual violence against
the other sex? Strongly intertwined with this question is the issue of how
the option to rape presents itself to rapists: is it always to be construed as
a blind, emotionally overwrought, and violent lashing out such as in rage
or fear of death, or does it more typically present as a temptation, some-
how promising a clear reward or payoff? If the emphasis is on the former,
then one can safely claim that no amount of more efficient policing is go-
ing to lower the levels of rape because the behavior of rapists is a symptom
of unstable psyches; it is largely outside of human control and will best
be addressed through mass programs of therapy and incarceration. If it is
merely an unintelligible acting out of a symptom understood least of all
by the perpetrator himself, then accountability is diminished. If, on the
other hand, the emphasis is on rape as a temptation, and the calculation of
possible costs and benefits plays a role in rapists’ behavior, then it becomes
important to better grasp that calculation and that gain. The predominant
tendency to psychologize rapists’ behavior, I submit, occludes these im-
portant questions and avenues of investigation. It thereby feeds into a cul-
ture of sympathy for perpetrators, which does nothing to counter the trends.
Current socioeconomic exclusion
The second interpretive frame adopts some aspects of the first one, re-
peating some of its mistakes, but at the same time it offers the advantage
that it better accounts for the ongoing high and possibly increasing levels
of sexual violence.
10
It does so by locating the causes of injured masculin-
10
I should emphasize that different interpretations of rape may be applicable in different
contexts of rape, and multiple factors may even be at play in any single event. Also, it is
S I G N S Autumn 2014 y107
ities not in historical factors such as colonial oppression or militarization
but rather in the posttransitional dynamics of socioeconomic exclusion.
This frame thus seeks above all a class, or even underclass, explanation for
current sexual violence. Focusing squarely on current probable causes of
sexual violence, some theorists blame the incompleteness of the transi-
tion: for example, Robert Morrell’s notion that “poverty and rising expec-
tations have proved a tragic mixture of fostering violent masculinities” in
South Africa ðquoted in Hamber 2007, 383Þ.AntonyAltbekerð2007, 100Þ
expresses a similar sentiment when he claims that the violence experienced
in the country, including sexual violence, is an indication of “the injustices
and cruelties of the past, and a gauge of the extent to which the process
of social and economic transformation is still unfinished.” Also Adam Coo-
per and Don Foster ð2008, 10Þreport on a study of relatively poor boys
on the Cape Flats who “utilize and invest in ½ahyper-masculine discourse,
in order to alleviate inadequacies, anxieties and the disempowerment they
feel in their lives.”
However, explanations or interpretations that see sexual violence purely
as an effect of poverty share with the first frame the difficulty of explain-
ing the asymmetry between the sexes in this regard: why do frustrated
and disempowered poor men, but not frustrated and disempowered poor
women, revert to sexual violence? Moreover, why do they typically target
women and girls from their own impoverished communities? In short,
why do unfulfilled expectations, the incompleteness of the social and eco-
nomic transformations, and a sense of disempowerment due to poverty
or economic exclusion translate into sexual violence aimed at the other
sex? Clearly this frame remains incomplete and incapable of doing the
explanatory work required unless it is supplemented with a more properly
power-political analysis of the relations between the sexes within these
impoverished communities after political transition. Several theorists in-
tuit the need for such an addendum to the poverty frame of interpreta-
tion, and they therefore link masculinity issues to the frustrations of pov-
erty in order to better account for the gendered form of the violence.
Brandon Hamber, for instance, agrees with Jewkes that violent poor men
assert a fragile or threatened masculinity through sexual violence, where
the fragility of their masculinity is not so much a function of former po-
litical oppression or of women’s rights as of poverty: their masculinity is
threatened when they fail to attain the “social expectations of manhood ...
conceivable that a frame like past perpetrator trauma plays a facilitating rather than a sim-
plistically causal role insofar as it may serve as a rationalization or justification for use by
perpetrators or their defense lawyers.
108 yDu Toit
because of ...poverty” ðHamber 2007, 383Þ. In the context of East Har-
lem in New York, Philippe Bourgois makes a similar observation regarding
second- and third-generation Puerto Rican immigrants who are socially
and economically marginalized within the larger community. But what his
description adds is that fragile masculinities must be read as a function of
the specifically gendered dynamics within these communities: “Unable to
replicate the rural-based models of masculinity and family structure of their
grandfathers’ generation, a growing cohort of marginalized men in the de-
industrialized urban economy takes refuge in the drug economy and cele-
brates a misogynist, predatory street culture that normalizes gang rape,
sexual conquest, and paternal abandonment. Marginalized men lash out
against the women and children they can no longer support economically
nor control patriarchally” ðBourgois 1996b, 412Þ.
Other theorists such as South African Charl du Plessis ð2007Þlink poor
men’s sexual violence to the increasing marginalization of men in the global
South from both the formal and informal economies. Du Plessis argues
that this phenomenon “diminishes men’s strategic indispensability in the
community and household, and results in resistance to women’s increased
independence. Men’s perceived sense of loss of control acts as trigger for
an increase in domestic and social violence towards women, with debili-
tating impact on the status of women in society, and with that, the ben-
eficial impact that equality of women could have on future generations”
ð2007, 10Þ.
The story thus gets increasingly complicated when a gender power anal-
ysis is added to the poverty frame—a picture belied by a simplistic under-
standing of sexual violence as somehow inevitably flowing from poverty.
Critique of the current-exclusion interpretive frame
Both the buildup of frustrations experienced and expressed by those groups
that are still largely excluded from the South African economic system
and the global financial crises, which increasingly marginalize the already-
impoverished groups in vastly unequal societies such as our own, help us
to read the steady increase in sexual violence over the past twenty years.
As a poverty story only, this frame cannot adequately explain the gen-
dered and intracommunal nature of sexual violence, but coupled with
insights into masculine dominance issues, the frame can help us to make
sense of aspects of the phenomenon. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels
of Our Nature ð2011, 623–26Þ, argues convincingly that violence is for
evolutionary reasons predominantly a male pastime. Biologically speaking,
there is an asymmetry between the sexes with respect to violence, because
S I G N S Autumn 2014 y109
men are preoccupied with gaining sexual access to females and with ward-
ing off other men viewed as competition and women are much more pre-
occupied with their offspring and with averting risks that could leave their
children orphaned ð623Þ. A main form of violence that men engage in
is intrasexual male competition, or “dominance displays” ðPinker 2011,
621Þ. It seems that it may be this kind of violence—namely, a display or
performance of one’s capacity and willingness to engage in violence, in an
attempt to ward off the high cost of actually risking one’s life in serious
combat with another man—that drives the sexual violence that we see
ð515Þ. Rape can then act as a theater in which one’s capacity for violence
is displayed for the benefit of oneself as much as for other men, even if
they are not physically present at the act ðBourgois 1996a, 255Þ. Cooper
and Foster ð2008, 10Þalso see sexual violence committed against women
and girls in the Cape Flats communities that they have researched as an as-
pect of the hypermasculine pose adopted by the poor boys.
A golden thread weaving through these studies is poor men’s preoc-
cupation with status and control. But why, then, is a natural phenomenon
such as male dominance displays perverted into sexual violence in situa-
tions of poverty? On the one hand it is suggested that patterns of poverty
and exclusion limit boys’ and men’s options to obtain status in their com-
munities, for example, through conspicuous consumption. Sexual violence
then becomes an important marker of standing within the group of men
ðBourgois 1996a, 255Þ. On the other hand it is suggested that it is pre-
cisely to the extent that poor women are empowered, whether through
globalization, development schemes, or women’s sexual rights, that men
become increasingly sexually violent toward the other sex. Whatever the
cause, I would suggest that when the more psychologically inclined ex-
planations fall away ðrape seen as symptom, whether rooted in political or
economic oppressionÞ, they make way for a more clearly power-political
interpretation of the nature and function of sexual violence. In other words,
the poverty story must be coupled with a story about gender politics within
poor communities; otherwise the frame leaves too many central aspects of
rape unexplained. Gradually, then, within this frame rape starts to appear
more as a calculated strategy of domination or oppression than a blind
symptom caused by psychological injury.
This second frame, however, shares with the first the tendency to other
the phenomenon of rape and to disproportionately blame the already-
marginalized part of the population for its prevalence in our society. Once
again there would be an implicit racializing of the phenomenon, seeing
that it is predominantly the nonwhite parts of the population that are
economically worse off. For the black upper classes it can serve to other
110 yDu Toit
rape in terms of economic status. However, this is problematic in terms
of what the frame does to society’s understanding of itself.
Although it may help to account for many of the rapes occurring, the
fact of the matter is that, in spite of some broad correlations between
poverty and rape reporting, the connection is by no means a tight causal
one. Misogyny and rape are not confined to the most marginalized, the
poor, the illiterate, and the unemployed in South Africa. The convenient
othering of rape in terms of class is thus not straightforwardly reflected in
the available facts. In Jewkes et al.’s study, this much is made clear: “Ed-
ucation was associated ½with being a rapist,withmenwhohadrapedbe-
ing significantly better educated, although they were not more likely to
have a tertiary qualification. ...Men who had raped were significantly
more likely to have earnings of over R500 per month, although they
werenotmorelikelytobeinthetopincomebracket½employed in the
study, over R10 000. Men who raped were more likely to have occasional
work and less likely to have never worked at all” ð2009, 1Þ.
Thus, neither the school dropouts nor the jobless are the most likely
perpetrators. Helen Moffett comes to a similar conclusion based on an-
other study. A 1999 study entailing a survey of over two thousand male
Cape Town City Council workers showed that 48 percent of them “had
physically abused a domestic partner at least once” ðMoffett 2006, 130
n. 2Þ. It had been expected that this figure would be much lower than
the estimated national average because the study population was in per-
manent and secure employment, and thus in terms of the earlier quota-
tion from Du Plessis, members of the population were indeed “strategi-
cally indispensable” within their families and communities.
From these facts we see that the simplistic correlation between sexual
violence and social exclusion that serves the othering of rape through race
and class is in fact significantly more tenuous than the frequent repetition
of this narrative would suggest. As in the case of the first frame, the attempt
of this frame to provide a neat causal explanation for rape fails insofar as it
is contradicted by empirical indicators.
11
There are also numerous examples of blatantly misogynist behavior
and attitudes among the political elite of the country.
12
The constant at-
tempts to simultaneously other and excuse the phenomenon of rape, and
11
In fact, these research findings could be interpreted to suggest that it is an aspirational
class rather than the poorest of the poor that is producing most perpetrators. Thanks to Tom
Martin from Rhodes University for pointing this out to me.
12
Examples include current President Jacob Zuma’s rape trial in 2006, during which he
defended his behavior with reference to ostensibly patriarchal Zulu custom; former Com-
missioner of Police and Head of Interpol Jackie Selebi, who claimed in 2000 that “most South
S I G N S Autumn 2014 y111
in particular the rape perpetrator in terms of class, race, or cultural back-
ground, is meant to hide ðfrom ourselves firstÞthe extent to which the
larger South African society is implicated in and complicit with the be-
havior of the rapist in our midst. This complicity has contaminated the
police service, as well as the criminal justice, educational, and legal systems.
For instance, Yonina Hoffman-Wanderer ð2008, 227Þwrites that “judges
far too frequently find ‘substantial and compelling circumstances’ that,
in their opinions, justify departure from the prescribed minimum sentence
½for rape....Such circumstances often rely upon outdated and inap-
propriate myths regarding the crime of rape. Such myths remain deeply
entrenched in society and are reinforced by statements made by highly
regarded leaders in South Africa.” As an example she refers to current
President Jacob Zuma’s rape trial in which he stated in his testimony that
“the ½accuser’sdecision to wear a knee-length skirt and later a kanga, a
traditional African wrap, were indications of her desire to have sex with
him” ðAssociated Press 2006Þ.
Patriarchal politics
A third interpretive frame can be labeled feminist in that it focuses squarely
on gender politics and on the realization of women’s rights within the
new democracy. As indicated briefly in the introduction, great strides
have been made internationally to acknowledge the power-political func-
tion and effect of rape, especially in situations of armed conflict. In her
summary of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugosla-
via’s ruling, Zambian judge Florence Mumba said that in that war, rape
had been employed as “an instrument of terror,” “a tactic of intimida-
tion,” and “a weapon of war” ðSimons 2001Þ. This raises the question of
how pronouncements and insights made on an international level can be
made fruitful in our local context. The first obviously complicating factor
is again the intracommunal nature of the sexual violence, which on the
face of it seems to undermine any attempt to make sense of it as an in-
strument used for political purposes. It would seem that one can plausibly
attribute a political dimension to sexual violence in South Africa only if
one assumes an ongoing power struggle between the sexes. Some com-
mentators have indeed called the sexual violence in South Africa “an un-
acknowledged gender civil war” ðMoffett 2006, 129Þand have tried to
African women who report rape are lying” ðSmith 2001, 302Þ; and former prominent politi-
cian and ANC Youth League President, Julius Malema, who was convicted of hate speech
against women by the Equality Court in 2010.
112 yDu Toit
conceive of the relation between South African men and women in such
enemy terms. The “war” between women and men is then usually traced
back to the advent of the democratic dispensation in South Africa, as if
what preceded it—both colonial rule and precolonial social arrangements—
were unproblematically and seamlessly patriarchal, and by implication
peaceful in gender terms.
Feminist understandings of the instrumental role of sexual violence are
invariably strengthened by the prevalence of patriarchal sentiments, such
as those expressed in the study conducted by Hamber et al. ð2006Þ,which
assessed “the impact of political transition on the security of women in
South Africa, Northern Ireland and Lebanon” ðHamber 2007, 384 n. 81Þ.
Hamber discusses men’s experience after a period of conflict when “men
feel threatened by the survival of women and try to reassert their manhood
in the spaces where they can, most typically in intimate relationshipsð2007,
385Þ. He points to the pervasive delusion on the part of South African
men that women are favored by the political transition and that men are
losing out by comparison, especially in terms of education and employment
ðHamber 2007, 384Þ. The following comments from the study provide ev-
idence that men experience women as a threat to their masculinity ðall from
Hamber 2007, 384–85Þ:
You can’t use financial resources against them ½womenbecause
now they are pretty much earning more than us. They ½menare
looking for another weakness within a woman. And that weakness
right now is sexual weakness. That we can always rape you, we can
physically show you our strength. ðmale participantÞ
½Themore women are empowered, the more aggressive men get
because they are losing their space in society. In particular those so-
called empowered women. They’ll always be ½thesubject of abuse all
over the ...everywhere you go ðfemale participantÞ
Men feel threatened. I see a lot of women who have gained a lot of
confidence in who they are. I know women who provide for them-
selves now and that threat is actually what maybe ½isevoking a lot of
violence. It is that strength ...I suppose you could say I feel weaker.
ðmale participantÞ
What we see here is that men feel weakened in their status not because they
are poor or marginalized or formerly politically oppressed but because they
feel deprived of power relative to the women within their own commu-
S I G N S Autumn 2014 y113
nities. In this frame, the political undertones of the previous frame now
take center stage. Men are understood as experiencing a loss or crisis in
masculinity due to the new democratic dispensation that threatens to dis-
mantle patriarchy or unearned male privilege. Financial independence and
sexual autonomy, or at least political claims on the part of women, seem to
translate into a general affront to men, even to the point of emasculating
them. Importantly, this interpretation therefore does not see sexual vio-
lence as a symptom of too little democracy, as the previous two frames
do, but rather of too much democracy. When the escalation of sexual vi-
olence in the wake of liberation is framed as a backlash against the dem-
ocratic empowerment of women, and asanattempttoviolentlypushback
the formal advances made by women, the temptation may even arise to sug-
gest curbing women’s rights so that the injured male psyche that causes all
of this destruction can first be soothed.
In an influential article, Moffett describes the current sexual violence as
operating in the service of a kind of political oppression that is in form and
intent intimately related to the oppressive system of apartheid. To show
this, she analyzes a television interview with a taxi driver who recounted
driving around during the weekend with some of his friends, looking for
women to “gang-bang.” The women they picked out for rape were the
ones “who asked for it, the cheeky ones, the ones that walk around like
they own the place, and look you in the eye,” he explained ðMoffett 2006,
138Þ. This understanding resonates with the miniskirt incidents in Jo-
hannesburg taxi ranks ðWilliams 2008Þ, where women who were regarded
as too scantily dressed were physically attacked by mobs of men. Here,
sexual violence appears as calculated and strategic rather than as the result
of psychological trauma or illness. Moffett sees many similarities between
these incidents and informal apartheid strategies of racial oppression and
control over a potentially dangerous and disruptive underclass. She writes,
“This is the same script that was used during five decades of apartheid rule
to justify everyday white-on-black violence as a socially approved and
necessary means of ‘showing the “darkies” their place’ ” ðMoffett 2006,
138Þ.
13
This is not so much a script of flat-out racial or gender rejection as
one that is violently punitive toward those members of a subclass who
reveal ðthrough their body language, visible signs of self-respect, and free-
dom of movementÞthat they do not recognize or accept their subordi-
nate status in society.
13
As opposed to “five decades of apartheid,” I would rather say “three centuries of
colonial oppression.”
114 yDu Toit
In this sense, then, rape becomes “a socially endorsed punitive project
for maintaining patriarchal order” and is used “to inscribe subordinate
status onto an intimately known ‘Other’—women” ðMoffett 2006, 129Þ.
This kind of interpretation resonates well with the instrumental social
understanding of sexual violence expressed by MacKinnon: “Availability
for aggressive intimate intrusion and use at will for pleasure by another
defines who one is socially taken to be and constitutes an index of social
worth. To be a means to the end of the sexual pleasure of one more
powerful is, empirically, a degraded status and the female position” ðMac-
Kinnon 2005, 129Þ.
I now turn to a critical evaluation of this interpretive frame.
Critique of the patriarchal-politics interpretive frame
This third frame improves upon the first two in a number of obvious ways,
first in that it can account well for the increasing rape statistics because
it frames the wave of sexual violence that women and girls experience as a
backlash against the unfolding processes of democratization, particularly
when democratic values are deployed in supposedly private and sexual re-
lations, that is, when they extend to women. Understood in this way, sex-
ual violence takes on a clearly political function in postapartheid, transi-
tional South Africa, in that it is meant to prevent or reverse the promise
or the threat of gender equality, which means that it also adequately ex-
plains both its intracommunal and its gendered nature, as well as the fact
that it is not strongly correlated with poverty.
Furthermore, this frame has the advantage that it does not hold for-
merly oppressed men disproportionately responsible for sexual violence.
In the absence of conclusive evidence, we should presume that sexual vi-
olence is unacceptably high in all racial groups, rather than presume that it
is mainly or only a problem in black ðin the broad senseÞcommunities. If
sexual aggression is not actually an expression of past psychological injury
or socioeconomic exclusion but rather an assertion of patriarchal control
when and where traditional patriarchy is being challenged, then the rap-
ist most likely comes from the group whose patriarchy is most being threat-
ened by the constitution, and that includes all social groups ðacross race
and class divisionsÞin South Africa. It thus counters the common tendency
to other rape in terms of race or class or ethnicity. If we face up to the fact
that sexual violence is prevalent in our country as a whole and not ade-
quately addressed by our social institutions, it becomes easier to notice the
widespread social complicity with rape.
S I G N S Autumn 2014 y115
I have indicated that a more political rather than a more psychological
understanding of rape heightens the accountability of the perpetrator. Of
course there are always sociopsychological factors involved, and we need
to take them into account, especially in addressing the problem, but we
distort the picture of rape if we allow an a priori understanding of the
perpetrator-as-victim to dominate our understanding of the phenomenon.
On a strong feminist reading, the domination of psychological vocabulary
in reference to the perpetrator is likely to function as an ideological ma-
neuver to hide the crude patriarchal domination exerted through the act
and threat of sexual violation. Raping a woman and being known to have
done so can earn a man many gratifications, such as a higher status or stand-
ing within a group of men and easy access to women’s resources, includ-
ing female sexuality but also female labor and female-generated income
ðthe “goodies” secured for men by patriarchies everywhereÞ. In other words,
we do not need the hypothesis of injured masculinity to account for
rape, and it becomes explicitly pernicious when it is used to create so-
cial sympathy for the perpetrators at the cost of sympathy for the victims.
In The Roots of Power ð1994, 150–62Þ, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone argues
convincingly that, although the penile erection in a man is indeed largely
involuntary and may occur for a wide variety of reasons, only one of which
is sexual arousal, what the man does with his erect penis is a human action
based on human decision making. In other words, sexual penetration by
means of the erect penis is neither involuntary nor the result of some force
of nature outside of the man’s control. Sheets-Johnstone argues that we
tend to confuse the involuntary nature of the phenomenon of the male
erection with the voluntary nature of the act of sexual penetration, and
that this apparently innocent confusion is ideologically motivated and main-
tained. It serves male sexual domination to construct male ðviolent and ag-
gressiveÞsexuality as an overpowering force and rape as instinctual, quasi-
natural, and susceptible to causal explanations.
Where the first frame failed wholly, and the second only started to
succeed, the third frame does by far the best job of accommodating the
experience of rape victims, namely, that they are specifically targeted for
sexual violence because they are women and not that they are merely some
collateral damage in a larger nationalist, class, or race narrative. Of the three
frames, therefore, this one so far fares best in incorporating the perspec-
tives of both perpetrator and victim of sexual violence.
However, there are also shortcomings in this frame. First, by framing
sexual violence as an instrument of political subjugation or oppression, it
recognizes sexual violence as a form of violence, but it fails to adequately
account for the sexual form the violence takes. There are many forms of
violence that can serve the purpose of terrorizing a subordinate group or
116 yDu Toit
class. The widespread occurrence of a specifically sexual form of violation
requires explanation beyond the claim that it serves the function of po-
litical domination, oppression, or subjugation. My intuition is that the re-
duction of sexual violence to simply one form of violence among others
is problematic. In order to properly account for the prevalence of sexual
violence in our country, we need an interpretive frame that can do justice
to the qualitative difference between sexual violence and other less in-
vasive forms of violence. For this we need to enter much more fully into
the experience of the rape victim than the interpretive frames discussed
thus far allow. In a sense it is safer to stay in the mind and probable mo-
tives of the perpetrators of rape rather than to venture into the lived ex-
perience of the victim. As David Lurie expresses it in J. M. Coetzee’s novel
Disgrace with reference to the gang rape of Lurie’s daughter Lucy: “Lucy’s
intuition is right after all: he does understand; he can, if he concentrates,
if he loses himself, be there, be the men, inhabit them, fill them with the
ghost of himself. The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman?”
ðCoetzee 1999, 160Þ. Moreover, the experience of the rape victim may
help us to better understand the event that is rape, and eventually also
to grasp better what it is that the rapist is pursuing.
A second objection to level at this interpretive frame is that it postulates
the relation between the sexes as a two-sided struggle between political
enemies. It thus assumes a competition or contest between the sexes, with
women taking on the aspect of a threat to men individually and as a group
that men usually reserve for other men or masculine groups ðPinker 2011,
525–26Þ. It thus presumes that women in South Africa who strive, for
example, for sexual autonomy do so in a preestablished political field in
which they are already included as the political opponents of men. This
is to claim too much. As I will show, rape functions to instrumentalize
women, and thus it strips them of their claim to both political and hu-
man status. This moreover tends to presume that the struggle for power
between the sexes is a zero-sum game because it reinforces the patriar-
chal notion of masculinity as power over women’s sexuality and labor.
On this view, every victory for women’s rights will therefore automati-
cally translate into a material and symbolic loss for men, every formal ad-
vance for women into violent resistance by men, and so on, ad infinitum.
I aim to show that the fourth interpretive frame can better address these
last two problematic issues than the third.
Ontological violence
The fourth frame through which the current levels of rape in South Africa
may be interpreted is one that distinguishes invasive forms of violence
S I G N S Autumn 2014 y117
such as rape and torture from other forms of violence. In a 2011 article,
Leonhard Praeg and Michael Baillie interpret rape in South Africa, in
particular gang rape, in a Girardian framework that sees it as a founding or
ðreÞgenerative form of violence with the capacity to reinscribe patriarchal
and differential gender identities where these are “threatened with a loss
of meaning” ð258Þ. The crisis of masculinity that calls for this sacrificial
violence is for them precisely “the transition to democratic modernity”
ð258Þ. It would seem that they incorporate yet go beyond the patriarchal-
politics frame above, with their insight that rape has both a sacrificial and
a regenerative or restorative power, and thus they further our under-
standing of the gain for the rapist. In line with Pinker’s idea that “men’s
attitudes towards women may be paternalistic or exploitative, but they
are not combative, as they tend to be with other men” ð2011, 525–26Þ,
as well as his emphasis on the excessive violence that may be generated
by male contests of dominance ð515Þ, Praeg and Baillie explore the idea
that sexual violence may not so much be an instance of instrumental vio-
lence ðin the service of gender oppressionÞas an aspect of the performance
of masculinity. Under certain conditions sexual domination over women
and girls, expressed through sexual violence, becomes a central marker of
a man’s masculine status. The act of gang rape as the sexual dehumaniza-
tion of a female figure simultaneously enhances the male bond as one rooted
in misogyny and acts as a theater in which men may obtain intermale hi-
erarchical positions. Rape is the theater and the woman’s body the stage
and props in and on which men have the chance to perform their mas-
culinity both to themselves and their male audience.
However, as Praeg and Baillie also point out, masculinity, like any other
identity, is always unstable and slipping and in need of affirmation ð2011,
260Þ, and thus one may come to question the need to search for a specific
injury, damage, or crisis in masculinity to account for the current rape
crisis in South Africa. It is conceivable that the rapes do not spring from a
specific crisis of masculinity ðlaunched, e.g., through the democratic rec-
ognition of women’s rightsÞbut rather from a confluence of factors that
channel male dominance displays into this violent manifestation. I thus
submit that there is no crisis of masculinity in contemporary South Af-
rica—neither colonialism, nor poverty, nor women’s rights and the dis-
mantling of patriarchy is to be blamed for rape. If male dominance dis-
plays are potentially as destructive as Pinker argues ð2011, 515Þand tend
to manifest in sexual violence, particularly during times of relative social
anarchy ð515, 528Þ, then we can fruitfully employ Ockham’s razor and say
that all that is needed to explain our rape levels is the large-scale social
complacency and ultimately complicity displayed by South Africans gen-
118 yDu Toit
erally, coupled with an ineffective police service. And the complicity of so-
ciety, I would add, is constantly fed by the three other interpretive frames,
which in different ways keep the crisis-of-masculinity discourse alive.
Says Pinker, “violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too
much, particularly when it is unearned” ð2011, 520Þ.
Sexual violence in our country today entails the following temptation
for men: it is relatively risk-free, since the report rate is low, the victims
rather than the perpetrators are typically both blamed and shamed by their
communities, social service staff often do not take rape seriously, police
work is sloppy, and very few convictions are ultimately made. Would-be
perpetrators calculate and minimize risks by targeting relatively young and
powerless girls and women ðanother indication that rape targets are not
viewed as political enemiesÞ. Yet it is illegal and therefore entails some
small risk, which means that it is a good arena for displaying daring and
masculinity, which are understood as the opposite of feminized and in-
strumentalized victimhood. Moreover, very important for our context is
Pinker’s insight that intrasex dominance issues are of paramount impor-
tance to younger men, and in our society younger men are marginalized
because of the large-scale breakdown of marriage as an institution ðand
therefore stable family life, the chance for men to invest in the children
they sire, male sexual accessÞand also because of polygamous practices that
result in an unequal distribution of wives, with older men having more
wives and younger men none. South Africa also has a “population pyra-
mid with a thick base of young people” ðPinker 2011, 688Þ, which is
dangerous because violence is a problem of “too many young males who
are likely to be deprived of status and mates” ð688Þ. Additionally, when
the demographics look like this, it is a sign that women are not control-
ling their own fertility: “Giving women ...control over their reproduc-
tive capacity ...may be the single most effective way of reducing violence
in the dangerous parts of the world today” ðPinker 2011, 688Þ. The pic-
ture that now starts to emerge is one where it is not the advent of wom-
en’s rights that is causing the crisis but rather the perpetuation of pa-
triarchal cultures at the expense of rootless young men as well as at the
expense of all women.
Although Pinker, together with Praeg and Baillie’s article, helps us to
understand how perpetrators experience sexual violence as a temptation,
in line with the criticisms I have given above, we should go further and
better account for the victim perspective in our attempt to make sense of
rape. It is well established in research that victim-survivors of sexual vio-
lence experience a sense of loss that can only be described as total, as
world-encompassing ðDu Toit 2009, 79–100Þ. By its nature, the act of
S I G N S Autumn 2014 y119
rape aims at the destruction of the sexual and personal integrity of the
victim, and the rapist intuitively understands the extent to which a per-
son’s sexuality lies at the core of her being. Persisting themes that emerge
from a close reading of rape victims’ experience include a loss of voice, and
loss of an intact world, an incredulity and loss of faith in oneself, a sense of
self-desertion and self-betrayal, together with a severance of once reliable
bonds with others—a disintegration of one’s sustaining relationships ðsee,
e.g., Brison 2002Þ. One’s natural sense of physical and sexual inviolability
cannot be experientially severed from one’s sense of spiritual inviolability.
As Lindsay-Ann Kelland notes, rape destroys a person’s “trust-beliefs”—
those basic beliefs about oneself, others, and one’s place in the world that
are necessary if one is to function as a person in the world ð2012, 120Þ.
This emptying out of oneself and the draining of all reality pertaining to
one’s world echoes and is often repeated by the secondary traumatization
experienced during the rape trial. Recall that 40 percent of our rape vic-
tims are girls under eighteen, which implies that the damage done to self,
relationships, and world is further intensified because of the tender age of
the victims. If we think back to the number of men who think of gang
rape as a game, it might seem that there is no overlap between the expe-
riences of perpetrator and victim in rape.
However, I claim that the temptation presented specifically by rape as a
sexual form of violence belies this complete separation of the worlds. In
fact, I think that on some level the perpetrator of sexual violence under-
stands as clearly as the victim does what the radical, ontological, and world-
destructive nature of sexual violence entails, and that is why he is tempted
by it. The ontological capacity of violence is such that it can not only de-
stroy worlds but, as Elaine Scarry explains in her meticulous analysis of
torture, this invasive type of violence can also “make up and make real”
worlds ð1985, 313Þ. Extreme violence that targets a person sexually is an
expression of a higher ambition than merely political domination: what I
call ontological violence aims to redescribe or redraw the very limits of the
real, of the truth, of the world itself. What I thus argue is that the thrill of
raping another person lies precisely in the embodied, manifested power,
indeed the sovereignty, that this act bestows on the perpetrator. The new
world of the perpetrator is built on the ruins of the victim’s world.
Critique of the ontological-violence interpretive frame
A thorough understanding of the ontological or generative capacity of sex-
ual violence is the best explanation so far for both the motives of the per-
petrators and the damage suffered by their victims. This approach also has
120 yDu Toit
the advantage of being simple, since we no longer need a theory to ex-
plain damaged South African masculinities. Both the violent and sexual
nature of rape is explained. A further advantage of this approach is that
we can hold men accountable for rape, even as we address the patriarchal
frame and social complicity that heighten the attractiveness of rape for
them. Whereas talk of injured masculinities seems to imply that the real-
ization of women’s rights must be curbed, the current frame indicates the
opposite. Sexual violence, but also violence more generally, will decrease
if we can more thoroughly feminize our society ðPinker 2011, 827–32Þ.
Improving women’s de facto status in society thus will not pitch women
against men but will work to the benefit of the whole.
Department of Philosophy
Stellenbosch University
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