Structural change is required in order to put an end to gender-based violence

Over the past few days I have been meditating over a quote widely attributed to African American historian and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois: “A system cannot fail those it was never built to protect.”

I first came across the quote in 2014 during the series of protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. The incident and protests ignited fierce debate about the use of undue force by the police against black people in America. It also stirred in me thoughts about the various societal systems of oppression that we continue to contort ourselves into, trying to assimilate.

As I thought about the quote, I was also reminded that in 2017 I contributed to a series of articles titled #FailedBySystems by my then colleagues and fellow activists speaking out against South Africa’s gender-based violence (GBV) epidemic. The book’s foreword states that it is important to “shine a light on womxn, transgender people and children … as they journey through a system which seems to be designed for their protection, but actually ends in further injustice, humiliation and trauma”.

On Friday, 21 November, various spaces in the country turned purple as part of an anti-GBV campaign. A colleague encouraged me to write about it after a discussion about an article I’d read over the weekend by Laeeqa Kassim titled “When a country stops, who gets to speak?”

Of particular interest in the article was the following: “The truth we cannot ignore is that a state of emergency gives even more power to the very institutions that already enact gendered and racialised violence…

“Mobilisation without organisation results in a performance of outrage without building structures of care, and risks aligning with carceral solutions … As Pumla Gqola reminds us, South Africa has spent decades performing outrage while the conditions that produce violence remain untouched.”

With the campaign claiming victory by getting the government to declare GBV and femicide a national disaster, it is important that we are not overly enamoured by it because, as Gqola points out, the conditions that created the violence remain entrenched.

Personally, my interest is in the work the organisers of the purple campaign have engaged in at the engine of where government power and levers are pulled for tangible policy change. I’m also interested in the sustained intergovernmental interventions that will be implemented to address the entrenched harmful social practices that embed the culture of GBV institutionally and in our communities.

I say this because that is the real and difficult work that goes beyond spectacle. I say this because I know the work of long-standing feminist movements that is often overlooked and dismissed by the government despite their consistent efforts in advocating gender-responsive policies and budgeting across all state machinery.

This is so that the systems sustaining our subjugation can be dismantled and rebuilt to protect us, rather than reducing us to cursory footnotes with just 16 days a year allotted for performative solidarity. Until then, there are no victories to be celebrated. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.