This Opinion article talks frankly about rape and other forms of gendered violence. Please take care of yourself as you read it. It names things directly to try to break through the silences that perpetuate harm.
I no longer say GBV, nor, after five years at Quote This Woman+, do I allow the euphemisms and acronyms around the upcoming 16 Days campaign to go unchallenged. Initially, because of a gut-feel discomfort: that vague language had to be linked to the failure to eradicate gender violence. Then, because of two concepts I learnt from linguistics: linguistic relativity and linguistic camouflage.
Words have power
What is linguistic relativity? The idea that the more effort we put into thinking about things, the more sophisticated our language (and that when we use sophisticated language, we make more mental effort and think more slowly and more carefully).
It’s a concept that allows us to accept that as language degrades, so does complex and critical thinking. If language is precise, it becomes more measurable, and thinking around it is more likely to deliver positive outcomes.
And linguistic camouflage? This is what allows us to understand the role euphemisms and acronyms play in our psyches. As humans, we are a people of trauma. People find it hard to look our grimiest actions squarely in the face. So we search for terms that make them less uncomfortable.
That turns the concrete abstract, so that we don’t have to take their measure. But, without a comprehensive, objective understanding of what we’re talking about, there can be no comprehensive, objective measure of change or progress.
Benevolent erasure
In the context of the 16 days campaigns, terms like GBV slip off the tongue – and across the keyboard – too quickly. They’re tightly-lidded boxes that resist both interrogation and assimilation.
Shouting for attention, they offer very little that is substantive. And this is their danger: a mask of benevolence that fronts violence as an unfortunate social issue rather than an expression of intractable patriarchal power.
I’ve seen many a journalist and policymaker defend their word choice by explaining that using comprehensive terms would trigger victims and survivors.
It’s true: for many, words like rape and femicide trigger nervous systems. They revive memories and feelings that are more comfortable to forget. But trauma psychology teaches that avoiding these words does not cushion discomfort – and there are at least three reasons why it could make things worse.
First, avoiding these words masquerades as benevolence, but it’s not. It is what keeps harm unprocessed and unacknowledged. It is the soft focus that keeps trauma alive. Turn a razor-sharp lens to describe exactly what happened, and your brain can name the event, recognise it and move towards recovery.
Second, it infers that the construction of meaningful language is trauma-insensitive. This is an insidious tactic to win hearts and minds while erasing focus on who is committing violence, and why nothing is stopping them.
Third, it erases the full warp and weft of the trauma we experience in society. The raw truth of what (overwhelmingly) men get away with. It erases the stories of police failure. Of churches that stay quiet, families and neighbours that look away. It erases the different realities of rural, urban and township violence.
Whose agenda?
So let’s own up to who benefits when 16 Days of Activism language looks the other way.
Those who benefit are those who are dishing out violence. Soft language softens political and societal pressure – enabling the status quo.
For readers of Daily Maverick, it offers us each a get-out-of-jail-free card for our individual and collective responsibility for our society based on murder, intimidation, beating and rape.
We keep behaving as if a polite approach will shift the deep structures of patriarchy, but we should know better. Slavery took a civil war before it could be exposed, dishonoured and changed. What chance that anything smaller in scale will topple the behemoth of gender inequality we live with today?
This does not mean throwing words at people without care. We need to think deeply about context. Sometimes we can use meaningful language by beginning with a trigger warning. Sometimes it’s necessary to find gentler phrases.
What you can do
If you’re speaking or writing on gendered violence, think with curiosity, then compassion, then clarity. Use curiosity to check how your words land, in your own body, and in those of your audience. Allow compassion for whatever you uncover, whether about your audience’s reaction, or yourself.
From here, choose new words that bring the most clarity. Own whether they tell the truth or hide it. The work is to hold nuance. To create emotional safety without sanitising reality, name systems and their violence, and still be gentle.
Naming violence is a political act. It will cause us to flinch exactly because violence itself does. DM
Kath Magrobi is executive director of Quote This Woman+