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Gender-Based Violence – Not My Problem

Gender-Based Violence – Not My Problem

Karen Botha, Karen Botha Attorneys

What is GBV?
 
GBV occurs because of normative role expectations and unequal power relationships between genders in a society. There are many different definitions of GBV, but it can be broadly defined as the general term used to capture violence that occurs as a result of the normative role expectations associated with each gender, along with the unequal power relationships between genders, within the context of a specific society.
 
The expectations associated with different genders vary from society to society and over time. Patriarchal power structures dominate in many societies, in which male leadership is seen as the norm, and men hold most of the power. Patriarchy is a social and political system that treats men as superior to women – where women cannot protect their bodies, meet their basic needs, participate fully in society and men perpetrate violence against women with impunity.
 
Drivers of GBV
 
Drivers of GBV are the factors which lead to and perpetuate GBV. Ultimately, gendered power inequality, rooted in patriarchy, is the primary driver of GBV. GBV (and Intimate Partner Violence in particular) is more prevalent in societies where there is a culture of violence, and where male superiority is treated as the norm. A belief in male superiority can manifest in men feeling entitled to sex with women, strict reinforcement of gender roles and hierarchy, women having low social value and power, and associating masculinity with control of women. These factors interact with a number of drivers, such as social norms (which may be cultural or religious), low levels of women’s empowerment, lack of social support, socio-economic inequality, and substance abuse.
 
In many cultures, men’s violence against women is considered acceptable within certain settings or situations - this social acceptability of violence makes it particularly challenging to address GBV effectively. In South Africa in particular, GBV pervades the political, economic and social structures of society and is driven by strongly patriarchal social norms and complex and intersectional power inequalities, including those of gender, race, class and sexuality.
 
The language we use
 
Our sentence-structure and the way we use language, literally conspires to keep our attention off men in conversations. The below illustration is about domestic violence and emanates from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope.
 
We start with a basic English sentence: "John beat Mary", where John is the subject, beat is the verb and Mary is the object. Whilst saying the same thing, we then change the sentence to the passive voice to: "Mary was beaten by John". In one sentence we have gone from "John beat Mary" to "Mary was beaten by John", thus shifting our focus from John to Mary, with John now being close to the end of the sentence.
 
In the third sentence, John is dropped from the sentence altogether, and we have: "Mary was beaten". It is now all about Mary. We are no longer even thinking or speaking about John. In South Africa we use the term “abused” to described someone who has been physically beaten by a partner, so we now say: "Mary was abused". The final sentence in this sequence, which flows from the others, is: "Mary is an abused woman". In this way, Mary's very identity – “Mary is an abused woman” – is what was done to her by John in the first instance and yet, John has long since left the conversation.
 
Men have been largely erased from the conversation about a subject that is centrally about men. This is one way in which dominant systems maintain and reproduce themselves, because the dominant group is rarely challenged to even think about its dominance. This is one of the key characteristics of power and privilege, the ability to go unexamined, lacking introspection, being rendered virtually invisible in the discourse about issues that are primarily about the dominant system.
 
Who is to “blame?”
 
Victim-blaming is pervasive in GBV cases, i.e. blaming the person to whom something was done rather than the person who did it.
 
It is not uncommon to hear people say things like: Why do they go out with these men? Why do they keep going back? What was she wearing at that party? Why was she drinking with those guys in that hotel room?
 
We have to start asking a different set of questions. The questions should not be about Mary, but rather about John. They include things like: Why does John beat Mary? Why is domestic violence still a big problem in South Africa? Why do so many men physically, emotionally, verbally and in other ways, abuse the women and girls, and the men and boys, who they claim to love? Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and boys? Why do so many men rape women in our society and around the world? Why do so many men rape other men? What is the role of the various institutions in our society that are helping to produce abusive men at pandemic rates?
 
What is going on with men?
 
GBV is not about individual perpetrators. This is a naive way of understanding what is a much deeper and more systematic social problem. Perpetrators of GBV are not monsters who crawl out of the swamp and come into town and do their nasty business and then retreat into the darkness. Perpetrators are much more normal and everyday than that. They live, work and worship among us.
 
The hard questions we need to ask are: What are we doing here in our society and in the world? What are the roles of various institutions in helping to produce abusive men? What is the role of religious belief systems, the sports culture, the pornography culture, the family structure, economics, and how that intersects, and race and ethnicity and how that intersects?
 
Once we start making those kinds of connections and asking those important and big questions, then we can talk about how we can be transformative, in other words:
 
  • How can we do something differently?
  • How can we change the practices?
  • How can we change the socialization of boys and the definitions of manhood that lead to these current outcomes?
We must not forget that men are also victims of violence. Most male victims of violence are the victims of other men's violence, something that women and men have in common: We are both victims of men's violence.
 
The bystander approach to gender-violence prevention
 
Among the many great things that Martin Luther King said in his short life was:
 
"In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends."
 
A bystander is anybody who is not a perpetrator or a victim in a given situation, in other words friends, teammates, colleagues, co-workers, family members, who are not directly involved in abuse, but are embedded in social, family, work, school, and other peer culture relationships with people who might be in that situation.
 
You may ask: What do we do? How do we speak up? How do we challenge our friends? How do we support our friends? Most importantly, how do we not remain silent in the face of abuse?
 
When it comes to men and male culture, the goal is to get men who are not abusive to challenge men who are. This does not only refer to men who are beating women. It does not mean a man whose friend is abusing his partner needs to stop the abuser at the moment of attack. That is a naive way of creating social change.
 
We need to get men to interrupt each other. For example, if you are a man, in a group of men playing poker, talking, hanging out, with no women present, and another man says something sexist or degrading or harassing about women, instead of laughing along or pretending you did not hear it, we need men to say, "Hey, that's not funny. That could be my sister or mother you're talking about. Could you joke about something else? Or could you talk about something else? I don't appreciate that kind of talk."
 
The bystander approach gives people tools to interrupt that process, to speak up and to create a peer culture climate where the abusive behaviour will be seen as unacceptable, not just because it is illegal, but because it is wrong and unacceptable in the peer culture. If we can get to the place where men and boys who act out in sexist and harassing ways towards girls and women, as well as towards other boys and men, lose status, we will see a radical diminution of the abuse.
 
There has been an awful lot of silence in male culture about this ongoing tragedy of men's violence against women and children. We need men and boys to break that silence. Not only do men owe it to women, they owe it to their sons, to young men who are growing up in situations where they did not make the choice to be a man in a culture that tells them that manhood is a certain way.
 
Ultimately, it is going to take a community of like-minded men and women, to challenge social norms within families, schools, places of work and worship, working together, to effect change and transformation within our society so that future generations will not have the level of tragedy that we deal with on a daily basis.

Written exclusively for Moore South Africa by Karen Botha Attorneys.