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In 2010, V-Day, a movement started by Eve Ensler to end violence against women and girls, hosted 5 400 events in 1 500 locations globally. In 2012, along with the V-Day movement, Ensler created One Billion Rising, a global protest campaign to end violence against women and to promote justice and gender equality for women.
On the Valentine’s Day of February 14 2013, people around the world held dance actions to demand an end to violence against women and girls. It was also the morning Oscar Pistorius murdered Reeva Steenkamp.
That was a mere 12 days after South Africa had been rocked by the unbelievably savage murder of 17-year-old Anene Booysen in Bredasdorp. Two months earlier, on December 16 2012, India’s rape culture had been thrown into the spotlight after the equally savage gang rape of Jyoti Singh on a bus.
The sexism blatantly on display during the US election in 2016, which led to former reality TV star Donald Trump becoming US president, also led to The Women’s March on January 21 2017, the day after Trump’s poorly attended inauguration. Tellingly, more people – mostly women – attended the march.
While the pastime of counting dead women did not change in the last decade, what started a real change of behaviour and accountability was the #MeToo movement. Coined in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke, it rose to prominence when actress Alyssa Milano used it on social media in the aftermath of former film producer Harvey Weinstein being outed as a long-term, serial sexual predator, in a New York Times exposé on October 15 2017.
While the magnitude of the problem came as no surprise to the world’s women, it started gathering momentum – starting with Hollywood.
Then it started to gain momentum globally, with predators called out. And, while not all faced the consequences, there were important victories.
The first celebrity trial and first guilty verdict for sexual assault in the #MeToo aftermath was that of former actor Bill Cosby. He was found guilty in 2018 of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand.
In South Africa, we have seen an increase of a brand of online activism which takes user outrage and converts it into a large-scale rejection of someone – mostly a celebrity’s work, product or place in pop culture – calling on the person or brand to be boycotted or ignored because of their criminal behaviour or bigotry.
This has affected many people in a wide range of situations, including rapper OkMalumkoolkat, film maker Khalo Matabane, and kwaito artists Brickz and Arthur Mafokate. The fact that South African women had had enough was made visible in the powerful silent protest of the women who held up Remember Khwezi placards during former president Jacob Zuma’s speech in August 2016. And, in July 2018, The Total Shutdown movement in South Africa announced that there would be a women’s march in August to deliver demands to the government and to mourn the lack of action on preventing gender-based violence.
The outing of Media24’s former employee Willem Breytenbach as a serial sexual assaulter shows that the momentum of the movement is far from spent. That #MeToo and its companion, #TimesUp, continue to build momentum is evident in the list of powerful men facing the consequences of their actions, even if those consequences are not always faced in front of a judge. It is a depressingly long list and probably represents the tip of an iceberg that is still to come, but here are a few: R Kelly, Roy Moore, Prince Andrew, Bryan Singer, Chris Brown, Mario Testino, John Lasseter, Russell Simmons and Jeffrey Tambor.
While change continues to come, it is sometimes hard to celebrate the victories in the face of continued brutality towards women, where men continue to turn women’s bodies into crime scenes. It is tragic that the decade ends much as it began: with particularly nasty crimes. The brutal rape and murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana and Gomolemo Legae are horrific reminders of how unsafe the world still is for so many.
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