1 is linked to this project because it is also about thinking through the contexts that help us make sense of rape. In this first chapter I am also interested in why so many in our society are able to believe some rape survivors so easily and refuse to believe others. Some of this has to do with the myth that ‘real’ rape looks a certain way or that all survivors behave in the same kinds of ways. But, as the chapter shows, there is also a lot more to what makes rape stories believable. Ending the rape epidemic in South Africa is going to require that many more people think critically about how seemingly benign behaviour enables rape to thrive. In other words, we have to think unrelentingly about how what we are taught in patriarchal society – and all of us are brought up in such society – seduces us into thinking that rape only looks a certain way, and therefore that we should only believe rape when it fits into that very narrow idea.
I start this book with this memory of rapists on camera for various reasons. The programmes allow me to talk about some of the myths that accompany rape in the public consciousness. They also give me a chance to speak about rapists, something that is important, but that very often gets lost in our public gender talk. Although we have massive evidence that rape is a national sport, rapists themselves are often invisible in the public discourse on how to end rape. Everybody says we should raise our sons differently, and that is true. But we seldom reflect on how to shift public behaviour in today’s adults, and even less on how we can individually – and collectively – sabotage rapists and hold them accountable. Instead, public discourse, with minority exceptions, proceeds as though focusing on rape survivors exclusively will end rape. It will not. This is the reminder in novelist Kagiso Lesego Molope’s quotation in the epigraph. It is also the lesson at the heart of her extraordinary 2012 novel, This Book Betrays My Brother.
More importantly, when we recognise that rape is a huge problem in our society, we have to accept that something in our country enables it to happen. Something makes it acceptable for millions to get raped on a regular basis. That something is patriarchy. However, to say that patriarchy enables and needs rape culture can still be debilitating for many people who want to know what they can do to contribute to a significant decline in rape, and ultimately to the end of rape. But we can all contribute to a country that takes rape more seriously, that makes rapists less safe, and potential rapists to hesitate. We can ensure that there are consequences. I am not speaking about the law. Most of us can do little about the law, about forcing the criminal justice system to take rape seriously, so if that is the only consequence we imagine, we are not going to make much of a difference. Instead, we need to ask the hard questions and embark on the path that Helene Strauss gestures towards in the third epigraph to this book.
We often place so much pressure on women to talk about rape, to access counselling and get legal services to process rape, but very seldom do we talk about the rapists. We run the danger of speaking about rape as a perpetrator-less crime. Or speaking of rape as a crime with a perpetrator that is so strange, so foreign to our senses of what is human, that we cannot but be puzzled and rendered helpless to fight rape. Sometimes it feels as if aliens come down to Earth to rape those constructed as feminine and vulnerable, only to then jump back into their spaceships and return to their planet, leaving us shocked, brutalised and with inadequate technology to fight back, to make them stop, to hold them accountable or to act in collective self-defence.
For as long as we allow ourselves to talk about rape as a series of isolated, puzzling horrors that happen to women and children, we stop ourselves from really holding rapists accountable. We need to expand the ways in which we think about rape, and how to fight it. If something or some things in our society make rape possible, then we can change this. We are society.
This book is my contribution to that public conversation on how to curb rape and how to hold rapists accountable, how to understand this phenomenon that holds us hostage, and how to stop the cycles of complicity that keep us here. We need to confront the myths and excuses that enable rape, and I list and address some of these in Chapter 7. But there are more myths and I may not even have heard of some of them. You know what they are. And hopefully, as our collective thinking about rape shifts, we can all grow more alert to such myths. As I hope addressing them head-on demonstrates, these myths and excuses do dangerous work and often enable a rape culture.
Chapters 3 and 8 address post-apartheid South African public cultures that enable and make excuses for rape. Rape survives and flourishes in our country because it works and because there are very specific ways in which collective behaviours make it seem okay. While we cannot unmake history, we can directly confront those aspects of our current collective behaviour that support a rape culture. Violence of different kinds has a long history in our country as both assault and self-defence.
In Chapter 6, I look at child rapes, focusing on what is so striking about our responses to these. I argue that we often pretend that there are ‘mild’ rapes and ‘brutal’ rapes, terrible but ‘understandable’ rapes versus inexplicable and inexcusable rapes. When we do so, we often speak of the rapes of children and old women as the ‘worst’ kinds of rapes. Yet, they form part of the very fabric of rape in the country – they are neither rare nor different in their brutality. All rape is brutal. It is not possible to speak of some rapes as the worst without suggesting at the very least that some rapes are ‘understandable’. But this system of gradation goes to the heart of the problem. It will never be possible to eliminate the rapes considered most brutal without dismantling what makes rape not just possible but also so permissible in our society. There is not much we can do about the past, but there is a wealth of different options in the present, if we are as seriously disturbed by rape as a society as we say we are. Furthermore, as Grace Musila’s comments on this manuscript helped me better understand, there are overlaps between the designation of some rape as the ‘worst’ because they are enacted on the bodies of babies and old women, on the one hand, and ‘curative’/‘corrective’ rape. Both kinds are defined by a shared logic of compulsory literal and symbolic availability of all women to male heterosexual pleasure. In other words, both the responses to the former and the existence of the latter draw from the taken-for-granted assumption that all women should literally and theoretically be available for the pleasure of heterosexual men. Crudely put, society raises us to believe that this is the function of women’s bodies – to please men sexually and symbolically. This is why women are accused of overreacting when we are angered by public sexual harassment, codified as legitimate appreciation. It is because of this underlying assumption that heterosexual men’s pleasure not only trumps our displeasure but that it nullifies our experience of unwanted attention as threatening.
Therefore the outrage at baby and elder rape is because these are children/women who lie outside the socially sanctioned bounds of sexual availability (because they are too young or too old), while ‘curative’/‘corrective’ rape is about ‘punishing’ women who lie within the sexual eligibility window for heterosexual male consumption, but they ‘dare’ not to be available – hence the belief that they deliberately choose to make themselves ‘unavailable’ to male sexual gratification, and can therefore be punished and/or violently recovered.
If Chapter 6 brings together a string of case studies, then Chapter 5 deals with only one: the 2006 Jacob Zuma rape trial. I could have chosen other very high-profile cases to focus on. However, this case was a watershed moment and instructive on many levels. My approach to this trial is not so much what happened inside the court case, but rather how the trial also played out in the court of public opinion. At the time, many of us argued that there was much about this particular rape case that reflected what happens in many rape cases across the country. At the same time, because it happened on such a large scale, many of the responses were amplified, perhaps allowing us to see them differently and clearly.
I have another motive for using this trial – it offers me an opportunity to examine the significant outpouring of support for the woman at the centre of the case – named Khwezi, to protect her identity – by feminists who wrote in to national weeklies, while also allowing me to see how those who were featured in the papers as unconditionally supportive of the accused Jacob Zuma spoke about their support. In the global obsession with South
