Cape Town - National anger over the rape and murder of Anene Booysen did little to bring about systemic change that underpins gender violence.
This was one of the conclusions presented by authors Joy Watson and Vivienne Lalu who presented a paper on the social and political response to the Bredasdorp teenager’s death in February.
On Thursday, the Heinrich Böll Foundation hosted a discussion on “Cross Border Observations” from India and South Africa. Both countries have seen unprecedented periods of protest against rape and gender in recent months.
Riots broke out across India after the gang rape and murder of 23-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey.
Watson and Lalu called this an “awe-inspiring moment” that made the response of South Africans seem “hollow” by comparison.
The South African government’s response, an investment of R10 million in Bredasdorp to help with job creation and poverty alleviation, was also seen as “misplaced and delinked from the issue of sexual violence” resulting in very little change in terms gender violence in the Overberg town.
Last week’s discussion was the first event in a project between the Böll Foundation in India and in South Africa.
The foundation has commissioned studies in the two countries to understand the two countries’ responses to the rape of Pandey and Booysen. As the India study has not yet been completed, last week’s discussion focused primarily on the Booysen case.
“Why, among countless other victims, has Anene become almost an icon of violence against women in South Africa?
“Why in a country with such widespread and normalised levels of violence, do some cases spark public outrage while others don’t?” asked Layla Al-Zubaidi, the foundation’s director.
Al-Zubaidi noted a number of other recent cases of rape and murder that received less attention than Booysen’s – Charmaine Mare, the 16-year-old Mpumalanga girl who was murdered and dismembered in Kraaifontein; Thandeka Mandonsela, 14, was found gang-raped and murdered in a field in Joburg; and Ge-Audrey Green, 15, who was found murdered and stuffed in a drawer under a bed in Kraaifontein.
Watson and Lalu noted rape had become so endemic in South Africa that the brutality of these individual crimes had become a benchmark for judging how worthy of attention a particular case is.
“Yet it is the everyday acts of violence, such as those acted out within many intimate relationships, that create the social conditions within which the more brutal manifestations of violence become possible,” the authors noted.
They argued that, although it was important to individualise cases through telling the story of specific victims, the context and systemic causes that allowed for these extremely brutal rapes and murders needed greater attention.
Cape Argus