South Africa’s Big Brother reality show became notorious this week when it broadcast a quarrel inside the house that ended with one of the male contestants punching a female. The decision to share this footage with an audience of millions would have been questionable anywhere, but in South Africa it is particularly insensitive. During the last few years the country has experienced a dramatic upsurge in violence against women, and an epidemic of sexual violence. Between April and December 2007, for example, more than 36,000 rapes were reported to the police. (Even this appalling figure understates the reality since many observers believe that only one out of nine rapes is reported.)
Within South Africa a sense of entitlement for impunity for crimes against women seems to extend to the very top of the social and political hierarchy. In 2006, the politician Jacob Zuma, now president, was acquitted of raping a family friend after he claimed the victim had been provocatively dressed, forcing him to act assertively since in Zulu culture it is unacceptable for a man to ignore a woman who is sexually aroused. It is helpful to place Zuma’s response within some context: last year the national Medical Research Council’s survey of more than 1,700 South African men (from all ethnic groups) found that more than a quarter had committed rape and nearly half of these had raped more than once.
After widespread complaints, Big Brother’s producers evicted the assailant, Hannington Kuteesa, though at first they asked only that he apologise to his victim on air. For many observers this was a meaningless gesture and did nothing to address the underlying issues. As a women’s rights activist warned the BBC “Parts of society still believe that women who get abused somehow asked for it.” Nothing they have seen on South African television this week would have challenged that notion.
All things considered, violence on reality television is an extremely marginal concern given the ubiquity of violence directed towards women in the real world. In Afghanistan, for example, despite the presence of female legislators, parliament recently approved a law which denied Shia women the right to refuse their spouse’s sexual demands. Current laws also prevent females from challenging the male head of the household if he decides that that his wife or daughters do not deserve an education. In the Americas the situation is only slightly less grim. A decade ago, a survey of women in Guadalajara, Mexico found that one in every three respondents had experienced physical violence at the hands of their partner; in León, Nicaragua the figure was one in two.
Throughout the Caribbean, it is no longer possible to read a newspaper without encountering more than one account of domestic violence and murder. Within Guyana these have become so common that an entire generation could be forgiven for assuming that routine domestic violence is simply an inescapable fact of life. As reported in this newspaper, our reputation here has become so bad that last month a Canadian judge was willing to halt deportation proceedings against an a woman and her daughter on the grounds that they would almost certainly face retributive violence from a spouse and father who had already been deported from Canada. However embarrassing this may be for us as Guyanese, it is hard to imagine that a neutral observer would arrive at a different conclusion.
In its 2000 report on violence against women, UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre cites a list of factors that perpetuate domestic violence. Grouped under the headings Cultural, Economic, Legal and Political, these range from “values that give men proprietary rights over women and girls” and the “notion of the family as the private sphere and under male control” to “limited access to education and training for women” and the “limited participation of women in organized political system.” It is not hard to see that all of these play a role in our current crisis, but partial explanations should not be allowed to rationalizations misconduct.
Every act of domestic violence requires an individual (it is worth noting that incidents of female violence against males has begun to rise noticeably, especially in the United States) to decide that their immediate wishes are best served by violence. Whether this decision is reached after provocation, under the influence of alcohol, or in coldblooded sobriety makes little difference to the outcome. Too much special pleading ignores this fact. We often talk about violence as though it were something imposed by social, cultural or economic constraints, as if the perpetrators had no say in the matter. That is a gross distortion of the truth. It has been well said that criminals often exculpate themselves by using passive constructions to describe their crimes – “the knife went in” or “something came over me” – and the same is true of chronic abusers. We should be far more willing to acknowledge individual accountability in these matters and to stigmatize domestic violence for what it is; otherwise, by tolerating a culture which casually accepts violence against women and children, we too become part of the problem.
