The political economy of sexual violence in post-apartheid South Africa

South Africa has the worst known figures for gender-based violence for a country not at war. At least one in three South African women will be raped in their lifetime. The rates of sexual violence against women and children, as well as the signal failure of the criminal justice and health systems to curtail the crisis, suggest an unacknowledged gender civil war. Yet narratives about rape continue to be rewritten as stories about race, rather than gender. This stifles debate, demonizes black men, hardens racial barriers, and greatly hampers both disclosure and educational efforts. As an alternative to racially-inflected explanations, I argue that contemporary sexual violence in South Africa is fuelled by justificatory narratives that are rooted in apartheid practices that legitimated violence by the dominant group against the disempowered, not only in overtly political arenas, but in social, informal and domestic spaces. In South Africa, gender rankings are maintained and women regulated through rape, the most intimate form of violence. Thus in post-apartheid, democratic South Africa, sexual violence has become a socially endorsed punitive project for maintaining patriarchal order. One result has been to constrict and compromise women’s experience of citizenship, as the promises of Constitutional equality are countered by the fear of sexual violence. The Zuma trial clearly demonstrated the shortfall between the rights women are guaranteed under the Constitution, and the cultural, political, judicial and social backlash they risk should they lay claim to these rights.