Durban - Gender-based violence (GBV) is another pandemic destroying South Africa, but a survey by the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) aimed to understand GBV in the country.
The HSRC shared its plan with the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education, Science and Technology.
The survey, “The South African National Survey on health, life experiences and family relations”, would be used to try to understand why GBV is a huge problem in South Africa.
HSRC group executive Professor Heidi van Rooyen said GBV was all about power, domination and control and sometimes ended with death. Van Rooyen said the true extent of GBV was unknown because available figures were outdated, which was why they were doing the study.
“To provide baseline data that helps us to begin to figure out what is the appropriate policy and problematic response. If we can get our handle on national data on the real extent of this problem, we’ll be in a better position to have the evidence to think about policy, programming and intervention,” explained van Rooyen.
She said the survey was to measure the effects of GBV and also document non-partner sexual violence, sexual harassment and other forms of GBV.
Van Rooyen said their specific objective was to describe the prevalence and patterns of all forms of GBV among people across sexual orientations and gender identities in the nine provinces. They hope to provide a measure of the health and economic impact of GBV among those victimised.
The project was going to take 30 months – 24 months for study implementation and six months for the dissemination and data handover. This started on September 1, 2020 and will end on February 28, 2023.
HSRC division executive Professor Khangelani Zuma said it was important for them to ensure they maintained confidentiality and did not create any situation whereby a person participating in the study could be known by a perpetrator to be responding to questions in the study.
Zuma said the first step of their sampling was randomly selecting 1 096 small area layers (SALs) out of the national sampling frame and the distribution of those SALs would be scattered proportionally all over the country, covering the nine provinces.
“In sampling these SALs, we make sure we’ve got a proportional representation by different types of geographical area (urban, informal, rural and farming communities),” said Zuma.
He said the second step was that among the SALs that have been sampled, they have a list of all the households in the geographical areas, then randomly selecting households. These will be people aged between 18 and 49 and will include marginalised groups such as the disabled and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) persons.
He added that households would be far apart and participants must be able and willing to provide verbal or written informed consent.