SA needs some honest chats about the root cause of rape and violence

Our country is at crossroads, emotions are all over the place and justifiably so; women and children are getting violated and butchered by men almost every day.

This however, should not excuse us from having honest discussions about the root cause of rape and gender-based violence (GBV), least we end up getting the diagnosis wrong and accordingly administer wrong medication to our patients!

For the first since the 1996 Constitution Court landmark judgment of S v Makwenyana, which outlawed the death penalty, South Africans from all walks of life are calling for an eye-for-an-eye retributive criminal justice system.

Among the prominent figures to recently call for an eye-for-an-eye criminal justice system is the president of the country, who was reported as having said that rape and GBV perpetrators should receive life sentences and be subjected to the harshest conditions in prison.

Populism on the rise!!

The problem with the said criminal justice system if reintroduced, is that it will not only perpetuate the self-same violence that our society seeks to address but also results in wrongful capital punishments which cannot be remedied!

Moreover, there is no statistical data to support the argument that violence can address violence.

This argument is obviously not strong enough to convince the proponents of capital punishment that they too will end being negligently victimised, so let us expand more on it.

If we accept the logic that no man is born a racist nor hating another man as propounded by our former president Nelson Mandela, surely we can also accept that no man was either born a rapist nor a perpetrator of GBV.

What then is the root cause of rape and GBV as perpetrated by men?

It is widely accepted that society, particularly a person’s social upbringing plays a very huge a role in terms of what a person grows up to become.

For example, it is often argued that if a boy child grows up in a family where the father almost always violated his mother, then there is a huge possibility that he too will internalise violence as a means of addressing issues and therefore violate his sexual partner(s) later on in life.

However, over and above this, one hastens to mention that poverty and unemployment are also contributory factors to rape and GBV against women.

The question now is how?

A man who is unemployed and accordingly poor loses his dignity and sense of authority not only in his community but also in the family setting.

He loses his self-confidence because he is perceived as having nothing to offer.

He is therefore prone to use his physical strength to assert his authority against women in the community and his family.

There are however, rich men who also violate and kill women.

Poverty and unemployment cannot obviously be used to explain their propensity for violence. What explains their behaviour is perhaps their sense of entitlement over women’s bodies.

These are men who believe that they own their female partners because they provide for their financial needs.

They certainly need corrective education and to serve their sentences in jail.

There’s certainly no amount of logical reasoning that can ever justify the violence that men mete out against women every day nor preclude them from serving their jail sentences if found guilty (in an open and independent tribunal) of having raped women and perpetrated GBV.

One has only attempted to dispel the myths that men are just naturally and inherently violent and that capital punishments will prevent their violence.

We cannot address the problem of GBV against women without creating jobs and addressing the 29% unemployment rate in our country.

• Sejapala is a writer and analyst and editor of Critic of the Critical Critics – Cornerstone blog. This article first appeared in the publication.

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