EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | Outrage about rape must be accompanied by action. Here’s what we might do

The ongoing war on women’s bodies makes our country one of the most violent geographies outside war zones. The multiple causes and factors that account for this despicable reality make it hard to imagine a pathway to peace, justice and gender equality.

Yet we dare not despair. Expressing outrage is necessary as an indication that our moral compasses (are sort of) still working. But expressing outrage is insufficient because it requires being accompanied with action aimed at ending the war to be most purposeful. Affect without material change isn’t enough. 

The violation of women’s rights to dignity, bodily autonomy and equality demand we take seriously our collective moral imperative to imagine, design and forge a way out of the rape hell. This has many dimensions, from the ways in which we speak about rape, posing uncomfortable questions — framed in the first-person — about personal culpability and working to eliminate the structural drivers of violent crime, which includes looking at institutional responses to structural violence, specifically how we respond to rape. 

Minister of police Bheki Cele, in his latest public performance of mediocrity and callousness, while describing the gang-rape of eight women in Krugersdorp recently, told a newscaster most of the victims were raped by more than one man, but that one young woman was “lucky” to be raped by one man. The subtext and implication of this remark is that she was “only” raped by one man.

Rape is so common in our country that we tend only to be ‘shocked’ if a report of rape includes detail that is more gruesome and gratuitous than what we have read and heard about multiple times.

He attempted, with characteristic clumsiness, to retract his remark by adding parenthetical words to the effect of, “if it is lucky”. But he had already revealed by then, through his unconscious commentary, an horrific feature of rape culture in our country: that we grade victims and survivors of rape by imagining some instances as more shocking than others. 

It is important to meditate on why speaking about rape in this way is not just deeply shocking in that it trivialises the gross violation, but also because this sort of speech creates a social context within which rapists can feel licensed to act without fear of reprisal. 

Rape is so common in our country that we tend only to be “shocked” if a report of rape includes detail that is more gruesome and gratuitous than what we have read and heard about multiple times. It is almost as if we are immune to the horror of sexual violence in general and so require a novel feature to a case before it gets our blood boiling again. This speaks to the normalisation of sexual crimes, a development which renders our nominal assertion of the foundational values in our constitution — dignity, freedom and equality — scandalously theoretical. 

Uyinene Mrwetyana, a student at the University of Cape Town (UCT), was raped and murdered in August 2019 in that city. It is difficult to admit this to ourselves, but that she was raped, by itself, was not the total basis of our strong moral reaction to this vile crime. Nor that she was murdered. We ought to be enraged by any attack on another person, let alone rape and murder. No further detail is necessary to occasion our moral outrage. But I would venture to suggest we were particularly shocked that Mrwetyana was raped and murdered in a post office in Claremont.

The space and place where the crimes happened jolted many of us out of our complacency. It pierced our immunity to being further “shocked” by stories of sexual crimes. A post office is supposed to be a safe public space, reserved for mundane administrative actions such fetching a parcel. Had she been raped and murdered in her home — I dare ask us to answer honestly — would our responses have been as voluminous, as visceral?

We have normalised stories about women dying in domestic spaces, particularly at the hands of men with whom they are familiar. In other words, we have created, inadvertently, hierarchies of rape and murder. Some rapes are regarded as more rage-worthy than others. The ways in which we speak about rape can and invariably do become our material social realities. Some words are useful, but many that are spoken are dangerous contributions to a culture of rape.

That is the problematic social context within which Cele’s remarks must be placed. If we speak as if being raped multiple times by different men is a type of new gold standard of violation, then we will slowly develop a casual disconnect with victims whose experiences of violation do not fit the template of what is required for national interest to be taken in their story.

We will find ourselves, if we continue unthinkingly speaking in those registers, back to a time (and maybe that time is the present) when some men think of some sexual violations as gentle and innocuous, as if the law is just annoyingly anti-male, anti-sex and anti-fun. 

For someone within the criminal justice cluster — a minister of police, no less — to show no appreciation of these elementary features of rape culture tells you everything you need to know about the state's lack of commitment to gender justice. If the state truly cared about it, someone such as Cele would not occupy the critically important position he holds. By keeping him as his preferred minister of police, President Cyril Ramaphosa signals to us that his commitment to effective law enforcement is merely rhetorical. 

This is not only about language which leads to social realities that enable and sustain rape culture. Our government also thinks badly about the requisite policy responses to the scourge.

There is no reason to be confident that the toxic masculinities that result in rape culture will be neutralised by chemically castrating rapists. 

The governing ANC’s subcommittee on social transformation, for example, has proposed the chemical castration of rapists. The idea is essentially to lower hormones like testosterone in a rapist so they might not be sexually aroused again or are less likely, presumably, to get an erection, and also maybe have little to no further interest in sex. 

This might seem, if you do not bother to think carefully about rape, like a solution with two possible benefits: first, it is an act of retribution on behalf of victims and survivors (“The bastard will never again enjoy sex!”) and (maybe more importantly and more optimistically) second, a deterrent from committing rape, which will make SA safer for girls and women.

Regardless of the good intentions behind this policy, it is a merely populist idea with no rational connection between the mechanism (chemical castration) and the goal (reduced incidents of sex crimes). 

Rape is not essentially about sex. It is an exertion of power. Sex is incidental to the gross, criminal exertion thereof. This is why our law on sexual crimes expanded, correctly, to define rape in terms that are not restricted to genitalia. You can rightly be found guilty of rape if you penetrated someone with any object or a body part other than a penis. The penis is just one biological object with which a rapist commits their heinous crime.

Chemical castration does not target this fact about rape. A rapist doesn’t need an erection to commit rape. So there is no reason to be confident that the toxic masculinities that result in rape culture will be neutralised by chemically castrating rapists. 

Solutions must not only feel like an acceptable expression of moral disapproval (which is what vengeance or retribution is about). If we want safe communities, then we better choose solutions that create safer spaces. Broken, toxic, unhealthy men are a danger to ourselves and to women and girls. That is what we should focus on repairing, rather than punting a populist idea that will not work, while appearing as if government is tough on crimes.

It is a political gimmick, a substitute for the hard work of effective law enforcement and of raising a different type of boy, one who does not become a rapist.

Bluntly put, even with lower levels of testosterone in our bodies, we will attack women if the reasons we hate girls, women and ourselves as men are not addressed. The ANC’s social transformation committee is not thinking clearly. In the past week I searched long and hard for evidence that there is, in some places, a clear and unambiguous link between chemical castration and lower levels of sexual crimes. There isn’t. 

Besides, how many times must criminologists point out that potential criminals in SA are not scared of harsh punishment, but rather worry about whether they will be arrested and charged for crimes in the first instance?

This is an important insight. It means the ministry Cele is running badly is more important to our chances of creating safe spaces than reforming the law to include chemical castration. Policing is so ineffective in SA that a criminal will take a chance and commit rape even if chemical castration awaits them because they will rationally believe the odds of being arrested and convicted are very low.

It is the police that fail South African women more obviously than our judicial officers when it comes to the value chain of justice.

But beyond policing and debate about penal codes and policy reform, we need to think about the more difficult social drivers and factors that explain our rape culture. As tiring as it is for many of us to revisit certain frameworks that seem to put each of us on trial, it is not untrue to suggest many of us are personally implicated in rape culture. 

How often do we self-police language and non-jokes that result in victim-blaming? How often do you call out friends and peers? How often do you choose silence when a “fave” is implicated in violence? How often do you check yourself when scolding a little boy in your family for showing emotion, for crying, for being vulnerable? How often do you prop up the idea that #IndodaMust fulfil certain social roles and leave them feeling pathetic when they fall short? 

In our homes, schools, sporting communities, social clubs, religious and other communities, we must do the hard, long-term work of giving psychic and social permission to boys and men to recover their humanities. We must role-model different and healthier ways of being a male.

Without letting the state off the hook — Cele must go — we must take personal and collective responsibility for our country being hell for women.