Wow. I take leave in the hills for a few days and
everything goes crazy in my absence. I
return to a university jittery in the aftermath of yet another upheaval on yet
another issue – this time rape and sexual harassment. I’m picking up the echoes. Demos, barricades, interdict, closure. Some students and/or outsiders behaved badly
as usual; the police behaved heavy-handedly as usual. The Vice Chancellor shoved down stairs; an
arrested student having a panic attack in a police van; another hit in the
chest with a rubber bullet. Letters in
the press; sundry viewpoints aired on the university Confessions Facebook
page. It’s so complex; no one has a
complete view. Lawsuits threatened in
every direction. Trauma layered on
trauma. Some lecturers, especially male,
declined this week to give lectures for fear of being invaded, interrogated and
labelled the enemy unless they went out and toyi-toyi’d, too.
Indeed, any whiff of
criticism of this wave of protest runs the risk of being simplistically characterised
as support for rapists. A new orthodoxy;
no subtlety allowed.
So let me be crystal
clear on my own stance here. I condemn
without reservation sexual harassment in all its forms. Rape, along with other kinds of sexual harassment,
is a national, indeed, global scourge.
There is no question that it ought to be eradicated, its patriarchal
roots expunged, its perpetrators punished, and its victims protected and helped.
There is no question that judicial
systems the world over have failed signally to rectify the situation, and that
decades of public critique have substantially failed to persuade sexual
predators of the damage that they do, and to deter them.
What to do about it now, is of course the question. We are dealing with an ancient and
many-headed hydra, pervasive in a multiplicity of forms, from international slavery
networks to crass teasing at the nearest pub, across a vast range of social
structures and individualised experiences.
It follows that solutions will have to be equally multiple, tailored to
local nuances and conditions. Globalised
legislations and idealistic mantras, while necessary and already in place, can
go only so far.
Local responses are
already well-established. Annually, I am
honoured to join a march or other event in support of women’s rights or in
opposition to sexual harassment and inequalities. Raising awareness and sensitivities amongst
men, and empowering women, through demonstrations, educative displays, media
exchanges, lectures, support groups and so on, gets my total support. In principle, then, I applaud student
initiatives to address the issue as it impacts upon them in the here and now.
All that said, it’s
tricky. The university is a locus for both new freedoms for the young, and new
disciplines. It is both an erotically
charged space, and a venue for challenging the status quo. We have a communal responsibility
to challenge the status quo, even as we try to maintain a certain stability and
respectfulness. The recent paroxysm of
rage has raised some troubling questions.
Righteous anger has always been a necessary element in compelling
change; and – as usefully outlined in Stacy Hardy’s article, “A Brief History
of Student Protest”, in the latest edition of Chronic-Chimurenga – students have often been at the forefront of such
changes. In this case, it seems to me,
some the modes of anger and rhetoric have spilled over from last year’s
protests, and have become a little misdirected.
Firstly, there has
been intense debate about the event that sparked the upheaval: the anonymous posting
of the euphemistically-titled “ReferenceList” of alleged sexual offenders. It’s
controversial enough publicising neighbourhood lists of convicted paedophiles or rapists; this is doubly shaky stuff. Women I’ve spoken to, despite being strongly
feminist or victims of abuse themselves, have termed it an unacceptable act of
vigilantism. One writer claims that 96%
of claims of sexual assault are well-founded and honest, implying that the
ReferenceList must therefore be 96% accurate.
This can’t by definition be shown, since that figure cannot include the
huge number of claims that never get proved in court, let alone the many
instances of withdrawn charges. Pontsho Pilane, who makes some good points in
her recent Mail & Guardian
comment, supports publishing the list, arguing that women have been left with
no alternative. If there is “collateral damage” to the innocent, that seems
acceptable – as long as it’s men. Hmm.
This view is closely
connected with a second problematic aspect: equating the legally-binding ‘presumption
of innocence until proven guilty’, which is written into national and
constitutional law, with somehow deliberately
“protecting the perpetrators”. That this
seems to happen in practice doesn’t mean that presumption-of-innocence law is
wrong. It’s partly a product of the fact
that a) many victims are understandably reluctant to lay charges openly or
immediately; b) it is in so many cases very hard to prove and prosecute the assault;
and c) the burden of proof is automatically, regardless of the crime, on the
charge-layer/victim.
I’ve experienced
this tough situation in a minor key.
Maybe twenty-five years ago I was stabbed and robbed on a staircase
leading down into Joburg railway station.
It was over in a minute of frenetic struggle; though I was bleeding, the
first and only security guard I found was uninterested. The attackers were gone; there was no one to arrest
or charge. Obliged to prove their guilt,
I would likely not have been able to recognise them even if they’d been caught. The law could do nothing for me. So I patched myself up and walked away from
it. Yet even now I still sometimes run
over the scene in my head, wondering what I could have done differently,
whether I’d been too naive, too slow, too weak.
I suppose I should
have made a fuss and demanded that station security be enhanced. This, in one facet of the demonstrations, is
what our students have demanded of university management. I don’t know how much practical and legal wiggle-room
administrators have, since they cannot (as some seem to be demanding) act
outside the parameters of national law.
I do hope that the newly-formed task-team can at least make it more
possible to humanely receive and pursue harassment cases (I understand a number
are already under prosecution, but are strictly sub judice, for good reason).
For victims, no strategy – silence, court, therapy – is ever going to be
easy. But it will not be made easier if
the anger is directed at the wrong people.
Of one thing I am
fairly sure: the scourge will not be mitigated by drawing yet more unnecessary
divisions – between students and management, or between students and lecturers. We can only do it together, over the long
term, by increments, by every available channel and strategy.
Hence, for example,
the study of literature is not irrelevant, even if it’s not happening spectacularly
on the barricades. Once the spectacle of
the street demo passes, as it must, the skills our lectures and studies develop
remain vital: the deepening of empathetic imagination, better understandings of
what drives human relations, the transcendence of damaging stereotypes and
generalisations, sensitisation to one another’s needs, tolerance of different
voices, the enhancement of self-confidence, the mental wherewithal to make more
intelligent decisions in one’s daily life.
Later in the year I will be presenting our first-years with Ursula le
Guin’s fascinating science-fiction novel, The
Left Hand of Darkness. Sci-fi? Irrelevant!
On the contrary. Le Guin’s novel
is all about cross-cultural understanding, identity and otherness, truth and
governance – and gender. Le Guin
imagines a largely de-gendered physiology which makes rape impossible, and gender
inequalities non-existent. It’s a
thought-experiment: What kind of society would we have if that were the case?
We will get nowhere
without such imagination, the power to envisage alternatives, and the hard-won
maturity and wisdom to work together across all other perceived distinctions. Whatever we might achieve might feel a bit
like the cap about be placed on the exploded Chernobyl nuclear reactor: a huge
effort of international cooperation, thirty years late, so much damage in the
interim, and hardly addressing the root causes of radiation itself – but an
achievement nevertheless. That’s our job:
to do what we can to take our sad song, and make it better.