The 16 Days of Activism gives us all an opportunity to focus on issues of violence against women and children. It is a useful time to have important conversations in this world of competing agendas, and we should use the next 16 days wisely.
In the past we have focused a lot on looking both at statistics and measures to deal with this particular kind of violence. This is important because we have to ensure that our policies and interventions are geared to provide the best possible support for victims. Perhaps this year it would be prudent to broaden the conversation to the underlying reasons for such high levels of violence against women and children.
Gender issues have too often been treated as an add-on to the developmental project. But the research is increasingly showing that inequality is a clear marker for levels of gender-based violence. Inequality not just by income but by other markers such as property ownership, education levels, mortality levels and access to the labour market.
Studies have shown there are strong correlations between levels of gender inequality and gender violence, and that poverty levels are in fact not a clear indicator of the likelihood of violence against women. The founder of peace studies, Johan Galtung, wisely noted that: "Personal violence is only for the amateur in dominance; structural violence is the tool of the professional."
If we are ever going to break this cycle it is essential we develop a feminist analysis of the political economy - how political systems, societal structures and the economy are all linked. Because dealing only with the symptoms means there is little analysis of the structural causes, and the political economy, long the domain of men, remains ungendered. The global financial system is designed in such a way that when things go wrong it is the marginalised who are hardest hit. Evidence shows that the global financial crisis of 2008 disproportionately affected women. Across the world, women's levels of unemployment were higher than men's, partly due to the fact that stimulus programmes were aimed at the private sector while most women are employed in public sector jobs such as health care and education.
International financial institutions have not assisted as much as the development finance narrative would like. The World Bank had reduced its investment in gender and social inclusion programmes from 6% in 2006 to 2% in 2010. Such institutions invest tiny amounts in gender violence programmes precisely because they see these as social and not economic issues.
And when there is investment in projects that should address poverty, these all too easily exacerbate gender inequality, as was the case with the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. An $8m (R110m) investment by the African Development Bank ended up giving most of the temporary jobs to local men and most of the permanent jobs to foreign white men. This pushed women into unregulated low-wage work (a characteristic of many development projects) such as domestic and sex work.
Free trade zones (also called export processing zones), that hallmark of the liberal market economy, create ripe conditions to exploit women. About 70-million people are employed in these zones, 65%-90% of those women. These zones are often set in places of high unemployment and so competition for work between men and women becomes fierce. Companies often use labour brokers to hire casual, un-unionised workers, and sex-for-jobs, along with an alarming increase in HIV infections, is not uncommon, as was the case in almost 40 such zones in Kenya in the early 2000s.
Chinese and Vietnamese women were beaten by security guards and had their food withheld when they complained to the Daewoosa factory in American Samoa about below minimum wages and shocking living conditions.
And then there is the global trafficking, slavery and sexual slavery industry that is a growing and enormously lucrative trade.
All of these examples are things that happen right here in SA. Women are trafficked, forced into slavery and sexual slavery, paid poverty wages, forced into sex-for-jobs transactions and excluded covertly and overtly from new job opportunities.
Like all forms of oppression and inequality, the issue is about power - over resources, over benefits and privileges, in the workplace, globally and in the household. As long as the political economy continues to be dominated by men it is unlikely we will develop critical feminist analysis of the true effects of these systems. Violence against women is an issue of power, and once we bring it into the mainstream economic discourse where the true power lies, perhaps we can start addressing the underlying causes that give rise to the horrific gendered picture of our country.
∗ Jurgensen is a PhD candidate studying the link between gender inequality and levels of sexual violence in conflict..