Some of you know that I wear a very severe, dark hat as a researcher of sexual violence. In response to popular demand (well, two requests), I’m posting the chapter I contributed to Women’s Activism in South Africa, edited by Jennifer Fish, Hannah Britton and Sheila Meintjies, and recently published by UKZN Press. (For those who don’t want to wade through all 30-odd pages, I get stuck into the Zuma rape trial round about p. 19. Lawyers wishing to represent me may write to me offlist.)
But I thought I’d also explain how on earth I got here, especially given that everything I read or watch has to be H-rated (no animals or children to be hurt, no rape scenes, no excessive gore). As a child I had to be led out of a school screening of Greyfriars Bobbie in such hysterics that I was exempted from any school movies featuring tearjerking animals thereafter. I won’t watch films with rape scenes in them (with the single exception of Thelma and Louise, and that’s because Susan Sarandon’s deathless line “When a woman’s cryin’ like that, it means she ain’t havin’ any fun” is worth a thousand educational lectures).
It all started, strangely enough, at Princeton, during an annus mirabulis in which I was a President’s Fellow there. South Africa was in full transitional swing, Mandela’s name was on everyone’s lips, people drove across two states to take me out to dinner upon hearing that I taught in the same department as J. M. Coetzee (they were to be bitterly disappointed, poor things), and Princeton itself was having a brief moment of radical glory, with a left-wing ghetto that included Cornell West, Toni Morrison, Andrew Ross, Grant Farred, Homi Bhabha, and more. Everyone asked me and Grant (as the token South Africans) about the future of our country, and every time we brought up the subject of gender, people looked baffled. We were on the cusp of a (fairly) peaceful transition from the most-hated regime in the world to democracy — how could gender possibly be important, or even an issue?
So I was invited to give a paper on the topic at Princeton’s International Center. And when you present something at Princeton, boy, do you prepare carefully. So I wrote something, presented it, got lots of useful feedback, went back to writing my PhD on Christina Rossetti (yes, the multiple personality disorder was already manifesting itself), and hid my paper on gender violence in the transitioning South Africa deep in a drawer.
Years later, I went back to the US on another fellowship, to the Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Center, located at Mount Holyoke College. And there I had a blissfully bucolic eight months in a rural setting, wandering the parks and forests and mountains on all sides. That nook of Western Massachusetts was particularly safe, especially for women. I spent a day hiking a leg of the Robert Frost Trail — alone. I hiked and walked, walked and hiked: crossing the leafy campus at 2 in the morning, catching the bus back home from Amherst at midnight, I went everywhere I wanted on foot or by public transport, and in all that time, I never had anyone so much as kyk my skeef. It was incredibly healing, especially as I’d taken up the fellowship shortly after a violent attack in my own home had left me physically more-or-less intact (bruises, cuts and a broken tooth only), but in a fairly bashed-about mental state.
And then I came back to Cape Town. And found I was a prisoner in my own home, unable even to venture out to the corner shop unless I first locked myself in an ugly metal box on wheels. It wasn’t new, and neither was my rage at having to self-administer a curfew, watch constantly over my shoulder, deal with post-traumatic stress syndrome all over again. I wanted to do something, but I’d tried that before, too, furious feminist activism, working for Lifeline, writing, marching, picketing, counselling — but it was all ambulance-driving. This time, I wanted to tackle the root of the problem of women’s terror — and that, alas, led me straight to the behaviour of men.
So all my writing is based on the assumption that if bullets are flying, it’s no use teaching folk to dodge them, or even bandaging up those who get shot; we need to stop the bloody bullets in the first place. And as I was realising that this was what I wanted to address, I unearthed that old Princeton paper. I reworked it and sent it to UCT’s African Gender Institute, which was running a fellowship programme, offering residencies for writers and researchers. I made a very specific bargain with God at the time: if I got a fellowship there, I would write a book about sexual violence in South Africa. If I didn’t get the fellowship, I was off the hook, and would go on to other, less eviscerating, projects.
I did get that fellowship, and so my life changed course entirely, not least because of my fellow Associates, five amazing women from all over Africa, who loved me and supported me and teased me as I did the stomach-churning research, had panic attacks, nightmares, crying jags. (A PhD on the PreRaphaelites does not prepare one for the kind of territory into which I had stormed.) I ended up staying with AGI as a Senior Fellow for five very happy years, and for that space and opportunity, I’ll always be grateful.
I wrote for and/or presented to Rape Crisis Cape Town, UN-INSTRAW, a British NGO called Womankind Worldwide, numerous social science and gender studies forums, and a whole string of medical conferences. I was commissioned to do a paper on child rape (instant nervous breakdown), and asked to present it at a Royal College of Surgeons’ session on non-accidental injuries to children. Here the Head of Paediatric Surgery at Wits Medical School stood up after my presentation and asked “Are you married?” Like an idiot, I said “No”, to which he responded, “Well, that explains that, then.” When I asked him to explain the relevance of his question, the chair of the panel (a colleague of his) told me I was out of order (yes, both were 50-something white men…)
So if nothing else, this project has taught me to cope with extraordinary hostility (some men REALLY don’t like it when you suggest that it’s their guns, not the victims who keep getting shot, that are the problem). It’s led me down some awfully dark corridors, and taken me onto some astonishing platforms. My work has shown up in women’s shelters as far afield as Kentucky and Portland, Oregon, it’s been translated into Spanish for use in parts of Latin and Central America, it’s gotten me to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, in Florida (now that was fun — what a lovely bunch of people, plus I could pop out to the Dali Museum over the road — something fitting about the surrealism).
It’s meant public exposure — I had to be taken out the room and given strong, sweet tea for shock after sitting through an illustrated lecture on rape-homicide by Lorna Martin (one of the bravest people I know); I caused a near-riot at the Harold Wolpe Memorial colloquium and was asked to apologise to various COSATU members I had offended. (Admittedly, I did lose my temper, and perhaps it wasn’t wise to suggest that if COSATU intended taking HIV/AIDS seriously, it would pass a resolution pledging all its members to use condoms every time they had sex.) But I’m not complaining; this research also got me dinner at La Colombe, and a bed for two nights at the Vineyard Hotel (oh, so this is why folk want to be academics) — that was courtesy of the Emory in Africa conference.
Most valuable of all, I’ve come to know many wonderful, brave people who are still out there driving the ambulances. I have no illusions that sitting in my ivory tower writing material about what causes men to rape compares to what thousands of activists out in the field are doing; but they tell me that I supply them with tools, and the closest thing there is to vaccine research for the cursed disease of gender-based violence. So I’m keeping at it, and keeping the faith.
Here goes. (Reader discretion is advised — this stuff ain’t for sissies.)
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January 23rd, 2009 @11:32 #
Helen, your chapter certainly ain't for sissies. As the mother of two boys it reminds me of my duty to be ever vigilant of their attitudes, their comments and jokes, the words they bandy about. Writing this I feel as though I am responding on a very simple level - but that's where I feel I can do something to try to make sure that democracy doesn't stop at this one doorstep.
January 23rd, 2009 @14:08 #
I can’t stomach reading that whole chapter, but I admire you Helen for this work. I see the ‘at least one in three rule’ backed up in my own family of three sisters: one raped, two beaten; at this stage I’m the lucky and unscathed (apart from witness trauma) third…
January 23rd, 2009 @14:16 #
Gosh, thinking of it like that has set me off crying...well Helen this is first time a blog has made me weep...
January 23rd, 2009 @15:05 #
Sometimes I wonder why these kinds of figures and chapters cause me surprise or shock or even dismay, or why the research is presented in such as way as to suggest the situation is almost abnormal, it seems to me, as witness to life for thirty some years that abuse, rape, violence and corruption are absolutely as normal and daily as breakfast. And probably always have been. I don’t even know why it is that I have a hope in my head that in the future things will change and the norm will be something completely different. Where did that ideal come from? In what age was it invented? Is it something really possible or is it a peculiar creation, like the fairytale wedding with happily ever after? Has it ever been different? I can’t remember it different. … perhaps I misunderstand the research, I suppose it’s not so much about normal or abnormal, but about how well things are contained in the bid to keep society reasonably civil and functioning.
January 23rd, 2009 @15:32 #
Ah, but then there are such beautiful things as David Hockney's Grand Canyon (and the real Grand Canyon) ...http://www.hockneypictures.com/home.php
January 23rd, 2009 @15:44 #
Just got the word from Helen: her motherboard melted today, so she won't be able to reply to your comments until Monday. Shame!
January 23rd, 2009 @16:08 #
I have just finished reading your chapter Helen. It took quite a long time because I wanted to read it slowly and carefully, and give it my full attention.
May I start off firstly by congratulating you on a first-class piece of writing. I love your plain English style (so refreshing in an academic context), and the reassuring sense I got of being in the hands of someone who really knows her stuff.
I felt strongly convinced by your arguments, and am now very anxious to read your book when it comes out (when will that be, btw?). Everything you raise is absolutely fascinating and spot on - and I look forward to seeing it discussed in more detail than the constraints of a single chapter allow.
The only part of your article that I would take issue with is your analysis of the Zuma trial. There are so many better examples of court-room patriarchy in action that you could have used.
For instance, you take issue with the fact that the defense was allowed to raise the complainant's sexual history in the course of the trial. Under South African law, this is absolutely and completely verboten, unless - as in this case - the complainant RAISES HER OWN SEXUAL HISTORY HERSELF. In that case it becomes fair game, and rightly so. It would be completely unfair, for example, if a rape complainant were allowed to raise her own sexual history to prove that she had been raped (eg. "I am a lesbian who has suffered sexual abuse in the past, and therefore would never dream of coming on to any man - and therefore this sex was not consensual"), without the defense being allowed to cross-examine her minutely on this claim. You can't convict a man of a very serious crime and deprive him of his liberty for many years on the basis of a claim like that - unless that claim has stood up to proper legal scrutiny.
Kwezi's claim did NOT stand up to proper legal scrutiny and - because the prosecution's entire case rested on the claim that her sexual history and sexual orientation would never have permitted her to consent to sex with any man - Zuma was acquited. And again I say, rightly so.
I really think that you need to look at your Zuma analysis again, especially if it's in the book. I know that rape activists have chosen to turn it into their cause celebre, but I think they are much mistaken in doing so. Their argument is predicated on a very serious misunderstanding of the laws of evidence.
I would just hate to see your own fine and necessary scholarship marred by a similar misunderstanding.
January 25th, 2009 @13:29 #
Helen - thank you, thank you, thank you for posting this. Your writing is superb and you hit every point with an admirable total lack of bullshit and academic obsfucation. You deal with the material head-on, unflinchingly. It IS a red button topic and it is a topic that needs to be discussed openly and accessibly so that the aura of shame that surrounds rape can be eradicated. Found what you said about the Theron advert dead right. I still remember watching that, thinking, 'thank fuck they're finally talking about the real problem', only for it to be pulled off the television almost immediately due to squeamishness. Gah. I'm angry, too. Seething.
Anyway, from this survivor: again, thank you.
January 26th, 2009 @05:59 #
Such hard stuff to read and process, Helen, but so vital that it be written and articulated and pondered. Thanks for this insight which makes me want to curl in a hole and cry for a week.
January 26th, 2009 @10:10 #
Thanks Helen, I'm only just getting stuck into it. Weekends are pterodactyl kitten time and I swear she actually eats it. Just takes that time and stuffs it in her mouth and gums it to death.
January 27th, 2009 @15:15 #
Worst netiquette possible: post something hectic and then disappear in blaze of ions (or whatever motherboards are made of) -- for FIVE days while negotiating with benign kidnappers (please! I'll pay anything! *sobs* just give me my data back unharmed). Thanks, folks, not easy stuff to read (or write) -- Alex and Fiona, I particularly want to respond to your comments, but right now I have four completely hysterical clients who needed things not by yesterday, but last Friday. I will be back when the wailing from my Inbox dies down, I promise.
January 27th, 2009 @16:32 #
Helen! Welcome back, glad the computer is up and running again.
January 29th, 2009 @12:30 #
Right, a quiet moment at last. Thank you for your comments and support (and tenacity!), everyone who engaged with this. Now then, Fiona first: don’t you want the job of editing this book? :) You’re right, the section on Zuma is still evolving and a bit sketchy in this piece, and you've alerted me to a logical weakness mid-argument – I blur the edges between sexual history and sexual abuse even as I critique the Zuma judge for doing so.
The whole question of prior sexual history is very thorny -- the traditional feminist legal theory position has been to exclude victim-survivor histories in cases involving sexual violence, but I've always thought this artificial (what happens if a prostitute gets raped, for instance? "What were you doing at the time of the assault?" "Well, I was plying my trade down Somerset Road..."). Far more problematic, it just bypasses the real problem, which is that a woman's sexual history should be absolutely irrelevant. By ring-fencing it in legal testimony, we perpetuate the notion that sexual behaviour by a woman that is anything but "chaste" and monogamous is so prejudicial and inflammatory, we don't dare mention it -- instead of saying "It doesn’t matter how many men a woman has slept with, it doesn't make her proof against being raped." Put it this way, if a straight man got raped, who would care how many women he'd had consensual sex with?
It wasn’t the interrogation of Kwezi's sexual history (this was how her history of prior abuse was defined) that bothered me so much as the utter lack of any "sauce for the gander". I was naive enough to think that JZ's own eye-popping sexual history made him a sitting duck for public prosecutorial exposure and humiliation, if not conviction -- and it just didn't happen. Why wasn't his history scrutinised? This omission was so glaring, it might as well have been draped in fluorescent lights.
Next, I couldn't help noticing that while Kwezi's history of child abuse and alleged rape was aired all over the place, there was a deafening silence on her status as a lesbian -- far more legitimately part of her "sexual history", but obviously it didn't serve the defense's cause to hammer away at that one.
But my real problem was with the wording of the judgment, where the judge merrily continued to lump child abuse and sexual assault into the category of sexual history (which should only include one's history as a consenting adult). Legally, this was a dangerous and clumsy precedent, and it horrified the tens of thousands of SA survivors -- the notion that a history of violence and trauma could be used against us to exclude any real chance of bringing a rape charge -- never mind the re-stigmatising.
Alex, I should have warned you not to read this, and most of what I want to say to you I'll do in person, but I just want to put this down: the one in three figure you see reflected in your family (as I do in mine) isn't something we have to endure. When I was 16, I read e.e. cummings's poem "i sing of olaf glad and big", about a conscientious objector who’s tortured for his beliefs. I was shocked by the powerful and brutal images in it, but one line stuck with me ever after: "there is some shit I will not eat".
Well, this is the stuff UP WITH WHICH I WILL NOT PUT. I will NOT accept my nieces and my god-daughters having to eat the same shit their foremothers did, and I will NOT accept my nephew and godsons being designated as predators just because they have a Y chromosome. This WILL change, and in my lifetime. It’s not that hard – but we need to start in the right place, with boys, who should be taught the real facts of life – that rape isn’t fun or easy to perform, and that this is no way to prove “manliness” – by their fathers. There’s work to be done, but lots of us are doing it, so take comfort from that.
January 29th, 2009 @12:49 #
Thank you Helen. I like that line immensely.
Here is that poem by e.e.cummings:
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
his wellbelov'd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"
straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)
but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"
our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died
Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.
January 29th, 2009 @13:54 #
Helen, this was brought home horribly last night when i was trying to find an article on the Cape Times website in the crime section and genuinely every third story was a rape case. We need more discourse like this, on the level in plain speak (rather than in Academish) fired by outrage and passion. Your anger comes through searing bright, but it underpins rather than overwhelms your argument. Thank you. And you should do more writing of your own rather than gilding other people's work. (with some notable exceptions cos I don't know what I'd do without you)
January 29th, 2009 @15:18 #
What Lauren said.
I downloaded the article last week, read through the Zuma part, but haven't read the whole article yet. But will soon.
January 29th, 2009 @15:26 #
And yeah, we should all commit to that sentiment "there is some shit I will not eat." Words to get tattooed by.
January 29th, 2009 @16:01 #
Helen, on the subject of why Zuma was not questioned about his own sexual past -
There is something in law called "similar fact evidence" and - apart from a few exceptions - it is not admissable in a criminal trial. You are not allowed to use an accused's previous conduct or convictions as the basis on which to prosecute him. You are only allowed to use evidence pertaining to the matter at hand.
Otherwise the law would just spend all its time arresting and convicting known offenders on the basis of their past patterns of behaviour. This rule of evidence might seem a tad inconvenient when one has a rape accused in the dock, but it is one of those slender barriers that stands between us and a police state.
January 29th, 2009 @16:47 #
Lauren -- thanks, that's lovely, and very kind (ditto Rustum). And Alex, thanks also for posting the e.e. cummings poem, I thought of doing so, but I'd already written this moerse post... Fiona, you are DEFINITELY my new editor. (My tame lawyer vetted my child rape chapter, but not the rest.) I understand about previous convictions, but what about behaviour that goes to pattern? Does anyone believes that JZ's actions in this case, at his age, constituted a sudden aberration or anomalous lapse of judgement? I had better not say anymore in a public forum...
January 29th, 2009 @17:06 #
I'll check with my own tame lawyer when he gets home tonight. I know that many vast, thick, draft-excluder-type books have been written on the laws of evidence, so it's definitely not a simple matter!
January 29th, 2009 @20:58 #
Helen, this is what the Lawyer had to say. Admitting evidence about past patterns of behaviour is even more of a no-no than admitting evidence of past convictions, because it is much more nebulous and difficult to prove.
The so-called "forbidden line of reasoning" is this: the accused has acted in a certain way in the past ... therefore he has a tendency or disposition to act in that way ... therefore he is more likely to have committed this particular crime.
It's a case of give a dog a bad name and hang him. And it's not allowed under our law - thank goodness.
January 29th, 2009 @22:11 #
Ta, Fiona. If that's true, why then was potentially damaging evidence (along the "forbidden line of reasoning" you describe) buried (allegedly) during the run-up to the trial? I've just written you a long post and deleted it because when writing about this, I have one hand tied behind my back. I know a bit of the back story to this trial, stuff that never made it into the papers -- but only through hearsay, albeit impeccable sources. So I have to tread very carefully when writing around it, making sure I don't let something slip that would expose my sources. But it's very frustrating, and I think that frustration emerges in my writing.
January 29th, 2009 @22:40 #
I honestly don't know. Maybe it was buried to keep it out of the media? The whole story of this man's rise to power is so fraught with intrigue that it's almost impossible to unravel. It must be immensely frustrating to write about.
January 29th, 2009 @23:06 #
Yes, and the larger implications -- for the nation -- are really scary. Surely you just can't keep ALL the bodies buried...or am I incredibly naive to think that truth will out?