By Dr Vusi Shongwe
Violence against women is a stain on the moral character of a society” – Joe Biden, as the vice president of the United States of America
South Africa is fast spiralling out of control morally speaking and if something drastic is not done to curb this curse, the future looks bleak. It would be tedious to list all the social ills that beset our society.
However, the abuse of women and children points to the moral decadence our country has degenerated into. Our social media is replete with dastardly and despicable acts of human cruelty and moral paralysis at its worst.
The moral repugnance that South Africa is experiencing is graphically captured by the latest spate of horrendous and stomach-churning slaying of women. A very huge percentage of women in South Africa experience intimate-partner violence.
Indeed, South Africa has an abnormal record when it comes to violence against women.
Perhaps the moral quandary in which South African society finds itself is similar to what Myron H Wahls, Judge of the Michigan Appellate Court, observed about America in his address titled “The Moral Decay of America”. According to Wahls, America needs “... a rebirth of morality, for clearly, we have managed to become a society morally confused, morally ambivalent and morally bankrupt. We have no clear and decisive sense of what is fundamentally wrong and what is fundamentally right. The nation’s conscience has become muted, or at best, ambivalent.”
This seems equally true about South African society, which finds itself in the same state of moral malaise.
In his address titled “Let me just say it straight: Violence against women is a stain on the moral character of a society,” Joe Biden, who was vice president during the presidency of Barak Obama, stated that he learned that until people are brave enough to step forward, to put the band-aid off, shed light on this repugnantly dirty little secret, nothing will happen. Spousal abuse is repugnant, but it is considered a “family affair”.
The patriarchal socialization of men assumes that if a woman is beaten up by her husband, she deserves it, an assumption that needs to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
Tightrope Talk: Cases of Gender Based Violence
There is another dimension that is often overlooked regarding the gender based violence discourse, and this has to do with the way the mal species is portrayed. Those championing the rights of men victims in relation to the intimate partner violence are at pains to explain the side of men in the whole scheme of things.
They believe the world community must also be introduced to concepts such as “gamma bias”—the cognitive distortion in which issues that impact boys and men are minimized (or never discussed), while issues that impact girls and women are magnified.
Findings within the field of experimental psychology support the existence of such a bias; for example, women are more likely than men to be seen as victims, women receive more empathy than men when both are victims of rape and intimate partner violence (IPV), and male victims of IPV are viewed more negatively than female victims of IPV.
Such findings suggest an “empathy gap” toward boys and men, and might help to explain the lack of explicit attention given to boys’ and men’s issues by national and international organizations.
The example that immediately comes to mind is that of a young man whose face melted and left disfigured after his girlfriend cruelly doused with acid. The outcry in this case is that condemnation and the outpouring of sympathy for the young man has not been prodigious as it is for the women who have been brutally murdered, and all those women who are currently in toxic relationships.
In short, there is a feeling that the debates within the field of gender based violence , while they offer valuable insights, they do not address some critical questions pertaining to the construction of the victim and survivor labels, including their multiple, contestable, and contradictory meanings.
In other words, there is a tightrope talk in which gender-based violence cases involving both sexes are reported, dealt with, and handled.
In their article, “Telling stories without the words: Tightrope Talk’ In Women Accounts of Coming to Live Well after rape or Depression,” Suzanne McKenzie-Mohr and N Lafrance, describe Tightrope talk is a form of linguistic incongruence that functions as a management strategy whereby women “navigated simultaneous and seemingly oppositional ideas in order to make meaning in a way that dominant rape narratives had failed to do, working to move beyond overly simplified ‘either/or’ binaries to more complex understandings. Tightrope talk is a way to “refer to these complex and subtle discussion accomplishments.”
It is one manner in which victims/survivors and those listening to them, can resist hegemonic discourses and master narratives, especially regarding agency. Additionally, argues Lily Kay Ross, in his article, “The Survivor Imperative: Sexual Violence, Victimhood and Neoliberalism people,” the notion of tightrope talk elucidate the emotional valence that underpinning it’s use: the kinesthetic sensation of balancing aloft, on a tightrope, afraid to fall.
Sadly, the society, either wittingly or unwittingly, is complicit in this debate. The media is also accused of being biased in its reporting. Its fixation of always magnifying cases involving women as the only victims is a cause for concern.
Moving forward, it is necessary to have an approach that brings together different actors, different perspectives and different ways of working to tackle this issue.
In one of her addresses, Viola Davis, the American actress and film, and winner of the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awards, whose family was afflicted by domestic abuse, dared the crowd to imagine a world free from violence against women: She said, "It would look like women understanding that they're already born whole, that all of who we are is ours," Davis proclaimed. "It's a world where you don't spend your life protecting the reputation of your abuser while you succumb to depression, suicide, body dysmorphia, anger, grief."
Dr Vusi Shongwe is the former head of the Department of the Royal Household. The contribution is written in his personal capacity. The views expressed here are his own.