Gender-based violence (GBV) is an attack on human rights that has a significant social and developmental impact on victims of violence, their families, communities, and society at large, and being a victim causes extreme psychological trauma.
As part of this year's State Of The Nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the government will intensify efforts to combat gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF), which he has described as the nation's "second pandemic." To combat GBVF, the National Strategic Plan was established in 2020 to address all types of violence and abuse against women and children. Despite this, numbers continue to rise steadily, in line with the president's colourful description.
While much research has been conducted on victims of GBV, comparatively little attention has been given to defining the perpetrators of this act.
As part of the National 16 Days of Activism campaign, IIE MSA School of Social Sciences recently held its inaugural Gender Based Violence Colloquium to offer stakeholders a unique opportunity to discuss solutions to end the scourge that is plaguing South Africa.
According to the IIE MSA head of campus, Andre Lubbe, it would be realistic to hope that associated statistics would be declining with combined measures like research to better understand the phenomena and awareness-raising campaigns, instead, the opposite is true.
The fact that these crimes' statistics are continuously rising, in Dr Alex Asakitikpi's opinion, shows that there is a disconnect between the objectives of current GBV prevention laws and strategies and the realities faced by activists on the ground, such as NGOs. The plan is to provide participants the chance to recognise these gaps and offer effective and realistic solutions.
Creating platforms to facilitate such conversations is one of the ways to offer a better understanding of perpetrators of gender-based violence, which is currently lacking, asserts Asakitikpi.
He goes on to reveal that, “our research has been largely skewed towards understanding the circumstances of victims of GBV. We hope that the framework created at the colloquium provides insight into perpetrators from a socio-economic perspective: for example, how do perpetrators define masculinity? How are they influenced by the values of their communities?”
He continues by saying that collaborating with various stakeholders, including researchers like the Human Sciences Research Council and the Department of Social Development, is a special and effective method to harness the variety of these perspectives and pave the way forward.
“There is often a lot of siloed work in this field, so integrating stakeholders' experiences is extremely useful,” said Asakitikpi.
“Such work is a starting point, we intend to use the learnings gleaned at this gathering as a springboard for further research. Over the next three to five years, teams from the school will focus on two to three areas identified as GBV hot spots, which will become their research laboratory.
“We will hone in on communities in these areas to see what trends are prevalent, and how dynamics at the micro- and meso-levels create the monster that is GBV,” he said at the colloquium.