The stain on South Africa’s moral fabric deepened on Monday after news emerged of an ANC councillor’s arrest for raping two teenage boys.
The scourge of rape, which according to police statistics shamefully shot up almost 10% between October and December last year, is a reminder of the culture of disregard for human life and dignity.
That in this latest instance it is a community-elected North West leader whose alleged actions have ruined the lives of two 15-year old Kanana boys, is even more despicable. The alleged rapes were exposed after a leaked video of the 40-year-old councillor engaged in a sexual act was shared on social media.
Coincidentally, it was this normality and prevalence which struck a nerve with recent University of KwaZulu-Natal masters graduate Thokomele Zulu, whose thesis examined how rape, which originally was a crime against the property of a man, morphed into a “tool of patriarchy used to police, perpetuate and uphold patriarchal control and dominance”.
Her study revealed there is a problem with the way society believes rape is solely the actions of individuals and that ridding society of a few “bad apples” solves the problem of rape.
She found, however, our current laws and policies have been shaped by a patriarchal belief that women are property of men and that if we reversed this thinking, it might be possible to end the power play associated with sexual violence.
But to do so, we must first wade through the political struggle that dominates our landscape. The reaction of political parties to the councillor’s arrest is a prime example.
The EFF in the province said it would dispatch its gender-based violence (GBV) desk to the boys but used use the trauma as a “golden opportunity to liberate the community of ward 25 Kanana which has fallen into the bottom of the abyss” and condemned the “heinous acts of sexual harassment and crimen injuria” as a “decisive rejection of the ANC government by the people”.
Leaders of society need to be held accountable and thus when they are elected to positions of power, the onus is on the political party to relentlessly screen those who raise their hand to serve so the bar in public office is set high.
Their gesture to offer welfare services to the victims is commendable, a tangible action to provide solace to the victims, but it reeks of soapbox grandstanding as political campaigns gather momentum ahead of the national elections next year.
Equally swift in their condemnation was the councillor’s party, who suspended him, saying his alleged behaviour went against the values of the party and they wouldn’t “stand idle when such tendencies rear their ugly face”.
While the ANC’s decision to hold its elected leader accountable is a visceral salve to outraged supporters and the public, making clear where it stands on the issue of abuse, it is not enough.
Leaders of society need to be held accountable. The onus is on the party to relentlessly screen those who raise their hand to serve so the bar for public office is set high.
In January last year, President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted three bills with a victim-centred focus — the criminal law (sexual offences and related matters), the criminal and related matters and the domestic violence amendment bills — to boost the fight against gender-based violence.
But as Zulu and dozens of academics and activists have screamed from podiums for years, the deliverables from the 2018 National Strategic Plan of Gender-based Violence and Femicide are important but cold comfort to the thousands of rape victims.
Instead we need to re-engineer the attitudes of men about women’s bodies and toxic masculinity through state-level interventions, especially in our classrooms, to stop the violence before it happens.
Rape is about power, and the only way to end it is to stop using speech and sound bites as a substitute for action.
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