Page 31 - SCAT GBV Report - Addressing Gender-Based Violence - 2021

If you’ve been beaten up, then you go to a police station full of people – this one is coming for an affidavit, this one is coming for this, this one is coming for that – and now you are coming to lay a charge against your perpetrator ... Now you’ve prepared yourself to go to the police station, and getting that lot of people there then you’ll turn back and go home and sit in your circumstances.
Mary Boer, DOH stakeholder.
They [SAPS] don’t have the car to go in the rural areas. They maybe go once a week ... If I do the application [for a protection order] it must be served today to the man ... I’m having those fears that if it’s more than three days and it’s not served, the women can be dead.
Ntombizetu Kalimashe, DOJ stakeholder.
At our local [health] facility there are staff shortages. Like in a tuckshop, at the DOH you just come for medication and leave. There is nowhere where you get someone that you can share your emotions with ... At a health facility you should get counselling for everything or have a space where you can speak to a nurse or a professional.
Mary Boer, DOH stakeholder.
The SCAT/CLS research found that ‘in many respects, the LDAs are standing in for government by shoring up crumbling services (without the necessary support), but victims still overwhelmingly do not get what they need from the systems that are meant to help them’ (Karimakwenda et al, 2020:49). A respondent describes this situation:
3.3
They [the LDA] are the only ones that are the linkages with all the different departments ... They are the only people I can refer such cases to and the people get immediate access for the problem they have.
Mary Boer, DOH stakeholder.
Disrupting heteronormativity and LGBTIQ exclusion: “To be a man, you need to be like this” 24
As discussed in the background to this report, GBV is integrally linked to social constructions of gender. Dominant gender roles and stereotypes, underpinned by patriarchal social norms, are reinforced through everyday acts that punish non- heteronormative gender and sexual identities (Judge, 2018). These norms shape the rules, behaviours and social statuses that are considered acceptable, appropriate or desirable, based on a person’s sex, gender and/or sexuality. They also obligate people to fulfilling certain functions within society, and support and entrench inequalities between men and women, and for LGBTIQ persons. This creates a permissive environment for gender and sexual discrimination and violence. In their work against GBV, LDAs have to navigate these complex dynamics of gender. Respondents variously describe the socially-defined rules associated with being a woman or man in their communities, and how these regulate power relations between and amongst women, men, boys, girls, and LGBTIQ people.
24. ‘Heteronormativity’ refers to the privileging of heterosexuality, such that only sexual attraction between ‘opposite’ genders is considered normal, natural and desirable. It is based on the normative assumption that there are only two genders, namely man or woman (which excludes transgender), and that a person’s gender reflects the sex they were assigned at birth, namely male or female (which excludes intersex).
“Finish this Elephant”: Rural Community Organisations’ Strategic Approaches to Addressing GBV 31