Nechama Brodie - Femicide in South Africa

When we say South Africa has a femicide problem a crisis, to use the words of the government what do we mean?

Do we mean we have a problem with fatal violence against women relative to other countries, or relative to ourselves? Do we mean that fatal violence against women in South Africa, now, is different from or worse than at any other time in our countrys past?

Some people argue that South Africa doesnt have a femicide problem, it has a homicide problem. That the real issue is our extremely high levels of inter-personal violence, the majority of victims of which are men, not women at all. This is a silly argument about a serious topic, which overlooks the unpleasant fact that both statements are true.

South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world (the fifth highest according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, using 2015 data). Within that, we also have a femicide rate that is five to six times the world average, depending on the year. We have a specific problem of violence against women, particularly sexual violence and fatal violence against women. Yes, these acts take place within a broader culture of brutality which becomes only sharper, harder, more vicious the closer you look at it but these acts are also distinct within the hostels of interpersonal violence that effectively define our countrys history over the past four centuries. Femicide like the murders of children, and perhaps the elderly carries such distinct features that, if we were to try and understand or profile these killings only in the context of male homicides, we would miss the point entirely. The violence meted out against women has long been distinct from the violence meted out between men.

This book is based in a large part on my doctoral thesis, which looked at how South African media covered the murders of women who were killed between April 2012 and March 2013. In my research, I tried to document and analyse exactly what kind of narratives and how many stories the media crafted and published about the murders of women, in order to compare reporting on femicide with the reality of femicide, and ultimately discuss how this media coverage might have influenced public understanding of this type of violence.

Over the course of five years I built a database of more than 408 femicides, linked to over 5 700 news articles. My research showed that less than 20 per cent of femicides made it into the press at all and that, as a body of work, those that did showed little correlation with the reality of femicide across the country.

This book builds on these findings, integrated with information and data from a series of mortality and femicide studies conducted in South Africa over the last two decades, and tries to look at the phenomenon of femicide in South Africa through a much longer lens going back 40 years and more to see if we are better able to understand not only femicide as it is now, but also if (and how) fatal violence against women has changed over the course of the last few decades, particularly before and after 1994.

What emerges, from both the short-term and from longitudinal data, is a much broader picture of a continuum of violence against women, which, with a few exceptions, I dont believe has changed so much as we have developed new words to describe it and new ways of conceptualising it.

What this also shows is that on one level we understand femicide very well particularly in the last 25 or so years, there has been a significant amount of good quality, peer-reviewed regional and national research into the epidemiology of fatal violence against women in South Africa. But at the same time, this has been accompanied by a mass of misinformation about crime and violence. Part of this is the legacy of an incredibly violent past and present, which makes information sometimes overwhelming, and also incomprehensible in the face of anecdote and personal experiences with crime and violence. It is also because of the states continued reluctance to take responsibility, even going so far as to obscure crime data on more than one occasion. And, in no small part, it is due to more recent malicious players like the white right wing who have propagated myths and false claims around race and crime, including claims of a white genocide. These myths and misinformation work so well because they creep into the crevasses of our prejudices and suspicion, and then we give them guns.

This book attempts to acknowledge these narratives the ones we have used to tell ourselves particular versions of how we think the world works and tries to explore and explain them, using data and anecdote but distinguishing between the two, and providing essential context so we can understand how both anecdote and data can be a product of their time.

What is important to take away from this is that individual stories matter, a lot, because when women die they are not and should never be considered as just statistics. But, also, that these deaths dont happen in isolation. If we are ever really to make a meaningful difference to combating gender-based violence, we need to see and understand it for what it truly is.