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Many years ago, I watched a television programme where a journalist and cameraperson sat around and talked to a group of young men who readily admitted on camera to having raped. It was a strange and unsettling encounter. It was also illuminating. The journalist was a woman and her questions probed the motivations, the styles and the patterns of the young men she interviewed. Something made them feel safe enough to talk to her on camera, but I can no longer remember whether their faces were obscured or whether they had been convicted and served jail sentences for rape. Whatever it was, it allowed a level of candour that is often absent from South African public talk on rape.

I can only remember one other similar conversation aired a few years later with young men who had raped Black lesbians specifically. It was a programme primarily devoted to survivors of rape, but at the end airplay was given to men who targeted out Black lesbians, gender non-confirming people, and women they suspected of being lesbian.

Because there is so much talk of rape and ‘corrective’/‘curative’ rape in South African media, I have not been able to find the footage I am recalling. I only remember how long ago and how far apart the screenings were because of where I lived when I watched them. But perhaps that allows me to work with why these two programmes made such an impression on me that they retain a grip on my imagination so many years later. In both, the rapists were unrepentant and laughing uncomfortably; and in the first programme they were sharing anecdotes. The interviewers grew visibly more flustered at the absence of remorse. Some of the men reported that they were no longer serial rapists, but most admitted that they would probably rape again.

In these instances, those who had retired from raping had done so due to something that had nothing to do with rape. They had generally stopped committing crime of various sorts, or had stopped the drug-taking that they partly attributed the rapes to, or some other lifestyle shift. The ones who did not speak of rape as something they did in the past admitted that they saw nothing wrong with raping. All of them insisted that it was a type of sex that they were entitled to. None of them wanted to admit that it was violence that had far-reaching effects, that they could ruin women’s lives, and that rape traumatises. They all insisted that while it was obviously unpleasant to be forced to do anything, the effects of rape were not long-term wounding. They also reported not suffering any real consequences themselves from a life of serially raping women. By real consequences, I refer to the fact that there had been no social cost to raping women directly. None of their relationships had suffered. They had not been ostracised or stigmatised. Even when coming out of jail for rape convictions, the argument that they had served their time and therefore required a second chance mediated societal responses to them, even if prior convictions and imprisonment does not always curtail subsequent decisions to rape.

Then something interesting happened in the first interview. The journalist asked how they would feel if a woman they loved was raped: a sister or a niece, specifically, rather than a mother or a partner. All of them were disturbed by this question, with one man swearing he would kill a man who dared hurt his sister.

The interviewer’s point had been made: one about the connections between his hypocrisy and brutality. If they genuinely did not find their behaviour harmful, then the consistency with which they wanted to keep the women and girls they loved safe from rape did not make sense. Clearly, these men were not ignorant of the effects of their actions. They raped because they could, and in this decision was the implicit statement that some women did not matter. Therefore, violating them is permissible.

The second programme was stranger still because the conversation with the rapists sat so oddly at the end of what had been a very sympathetic and sensitive series of conversations with young lesbians who had either been raped themselves or supported loved ones who had been raped. These men spoke unequivocally of their entitlement to teach these women a lesson that men would have access to their bodies regardless of what they wanted. Rape, here, was explicitly a weapon. There was no doublespeak, no excuses.

I am working from memory, and memory is unreliable, so there are aspects of the programmes that I may have edited out. I start with this recollection because these shows offered rare public access to the mind of a rapist. In most public talk, people distance themselves from rape and express incomprehension about how rape continues to have such a firm grip on our society. These men were not animals or monsters. They looked like anybody’s brother, boyfriend or son. There is no way to tell who can choose to rape, even though women and girls are often told that they can protect themselves by staying away from certain places and kinds of men. Rapists can be anywhere and everywhere; rape culture and the manufacture of female fear (which I also call the female fear factory) are part of how we collectively get socialised to accept the ever-presence of rape most often by being invited to be vigilant. The female fear factory is a subject I dedicate Chapter 4 to.

To start with this anecdote does not mean that these men verbalised something we might want to think of as ‘typical’ of rapist behaviour. This clearly is not the case. We do not have brazen admissions of having raped women by all the men who have in fact done so. Rather, what is important about these two programmes is the notion that women’s pain is negotiable, that while rapists know (because how can they not) that they inflict harm, they proceed to do so in any event. And they do so often, knowing that many will line up alongside them to defend them against such accusation, requiring evidence and the legal reporting. They also know of the high likelihood that they will be acquitted in legal courts and the court of public opinion.

It is a myth that rapists come from a certain background, race, class location or religion. At the same time, there are very specific reasons why so many people continue to believe that some groups of men are more likely to be rapists than others. In the long 2004 public argument with Charlene Smith, former South African president Thabo Mbeki was not entirely off the mark when he insisted that we need to interrogate the automatic links made between Black men and rape. At the same time, Charlene Smith was correct to point out the prevalence of rape and its unacceptability. The stereotype of the Black male rapist of white women has been central to the rise of racism, and it has also been used as justification for lynching and killing tens of thousands of Black men across the globe – in the Americas, on the African continent and in South Asia. I am using capitalised Black here to refer to black and brown people, in other words, the collective people of African and South Asian descent. This is not a small matter, and constructions of ‘black peril’, or what was termed ‘swaartgevaar’ in colonial and apartheid South Africa, depended heavily on this idea of the sexually and otherwise violent Black man. So, we do need to constantly guard against reliance on stereotype to explain rape and to fight for its end. At the same time, guarding against stereotype cannot be justification to silence activism against rape. To say a stereotype exists does not mean that Black men never rape women of any race. Most rape survivors in South Africa are Black because most people in South Africa are Black; that seems quite straightforward. However, there is a much more insidious reason for the large numbers of rape than numbers. The same white supremacy that constructed the stereotype of Black man as rapist, created the stereotype of Black women as hypersexual and therefore impossible to rape. Making Black women impossible to rape does not mean making them safe against rape. It means quite the opposite: that Black women are safe to rape, that raping them does not count as harm and is therefore permissible. It also means that it is not an accident that when Black women say they have been raped, they are almost never taken seriously and in many instances are expected to just get over it.

In Chapter 2, I briefly trace how this came to be so. I do not expect you to just take my word for it, and, if this chapter piques your curiosity, there is a wealth of scholarship that demonstrates how this is true in relation to East African, American and South Asian contexts too. It is not an accident that the explosions and brazen instances of rape in South Africa and India have been so remarkably similar in recent years. Part of this history of who becomes safe to rape, and safe to construct as unrapable is directly linked to this history. Here, and throughout this book, I use unrapable and impossible to rape to mean the same thing: the creation of the racist myth that this is so also makes it possible for those coded as unrapable to be habitually raped as a matter of course.

In Chapter 2, I also trace the long history of rape in South Africa, unpack the pornography of empire, and demonstrate how it is that although all women are in danger of rape, Black women are the most likely to be raped. It is not for the reasons that would seem ‘logical’ or obvious. It has little to do with numbers, and much to do with how rape and race have historically intersected in mutually reinforcing ways. In this chapter, I show that these examples are different racist regimes.

Chapter 1 is linked to this project because it is also about thinking through the contexts that help us make sense of rape. In this first chapter I am also interested in why so many in our society are able to believe some rape survivors so easily and refuse to believe others. Some of this has to do with the myth that ‘real’ rape looks a certain way or that all survivors behave in the same kinds of ways. But, as the chapter shows, there is also a lot more to what makes rape stories believable. Ending the rape epidemic in South Africa is going to require that many more people think critically about how seemingly benign behaviour enables rape to thrive. In other words, we have to think unrelentingly about how what we are taught in patriarchal society – and all of us are brought up in such society – seduces us into thinking that rape only looks a certain way, and therefore that we should only believe rape when it fits into that very narrow idea.

I start this book with this memory of rapists on camera for various reasons. The programmes allow me to talk about some of the myths that accompany rape in the public consciousness. They also give me a chance to speak about rapists, something that is important, but that very often gets lost in our public gender talk. Although we have massive evidence that rape is a national sport, rapists themselves are often invisible in the public discourse on how to end rape. Everybody says we should raise our sons differently, and that is true. But we seldom reflect on how to shift public behaviour in today’s adults, and even less on how we can individually – and collectively – sabotage rapists and hold them accountable. Instead, public discourse, with minority exceptions, proceeds as though focusing on rape survivors exclusively will end rape. It will not. This is the reminder in novelist Kagiso Lesego Molope’s quotation in the epigraph. It is also the lesson at the heart of her extraordinary 2012 novel, This Book Betrays My Brother.

More importantly, when we recognise that rape is a huge problem in our society, we have to accept that something in our country enables it to happen. Something makes it acceptable for millions to get raped on a regular basis. That something is patriarchy. However, to say that patriarchy enables and needs rape culture can still be debilitating for many people who want to know what they can do to contribute to a significant decline in rape, and ultimately to the end of rape. But we can all contribute to a country that takes rape more seriously, that makes rapists less safe, and potential rapists to hesitate. We can ensure that there are consequences. I am not speaking about the law. Most of us can do little about the law, about forcing the criminal justice system to take rape seriously, so if that is the only consequence we imagine, we are not going to make much of a difference. Instead, we need to ask the hard questions and embark on the path that Helene Strauss gestures towards in the third epigraph to this book.

We often place so much pressure on women to talk about rape, to access counselling and get legal services to process rape, but very seldom do we talk about the rapists. We run the danger of speaking about rape as a perpetrator-less crime. Or speaking of rape as a crime with a perpetrator that is so strange, so foreign to our senses of what is human, that we cannot but be puzzled and rendered helpless to fight rape. Sometimes it feels as if aliens come down to Earth to rape those constructed as feminine and vulnerable, only to then jump back into their spaceships and return to their planet, leaving us shocked, brutalised and with inadequate technology to fight back, to make them stop, to hold them accountable or to act in collective self-defence.

For as long as we allow ourselves to talk about rape as a series of isolated, puzzling horrors that happen to women and children, we stop ourselves from really holding rapists accountable. We need to expand the ways in which we think about rape, and how to fight it. If something or some things in our society make rape possible, then we can change this. We are society.

This book is my contribution to that public conversation on how to curb rape and how to hold rapists accountable, how to understand this phenomenon that holds us hostage, and how to stop the cycles of complicity that keep us here. We need to confront the myths and excuses that enable rape, and I list and address some of these in Chapter 7. But there are more myths and I may not even have heard of some of them. You know what they are. And hopefully, as our collective thinking about rape shifts, we can all grow more alert to such myths. As I hope addressing them head-on demonstrates, these myths and excuses do dangerous work and often enable a rape culture.

Chapters 3 and 8 address post-apartheid South African public cultures that enable and make excuses for rape. Rape survives and flourishes in our country because it works and because there are very specific ways in which collective behaviours make it seem okay. While we cannot unmake history, we can directly confront those aspects of our current collective behaviour that support a rape culture. Violence of different kinds has a long history in our country as both assault and self-defence.

In Chapter 6, I look at child rapes, focusing on what is so striking about our responses to these. I argue that we often pretend that there are ‘mild’ rapes and ‘brutal’ rapes, terrible but ‘understandable’ rapes versus inexplicable and inexcusable rapes. When we do so, we often speak of the rapes of children and old women as the ‘worst’ kinds of rapes. Yet, they form part of the very fabric of rape in the country – they are neither rare nor different in their brutality. All rape is brutal. It is not possible to speak of some rapes as the worst without suggesting at the very least that some rapes are ‘understandable’. But this system of gradation goes to the heart of the problem. It will never be possible to eliminate the rapes considered most brutal without dismantling what makes rape not just possible but also so permissible in our society. There is not much we can do about the past, but there is a wealth of different options in the present, if we are as seriously disturbed by rape as a society as we say we are. Furthermore, as Grace Musila’s comments on this manuscript helped me better understand, there are overlaps between the designation of some rape as the ‘worst’ because they are enacted on the bodies of babies and old women, on the one hand, and ‘curative’/‘corrective’ rape. Both kinds are defined by a shared logic of compulsory literal and symbolic availability of all women to male heterosexual pleasure. In other words, both the responses to the former and the existence of the latter draw from the taken-for-granted assumption that all women should literally and theoretically be available for the pleasure of heterosexual men. Crudely put, society raises us to believe that this is the function of women’s bodies – to please men sexually and symbolically. This is why women are accused of overreacting when we are angered by public sexual harassment, codified as legitimate appreciation. It is because of this underlying assumption that heterosexual men’s pleasure not only trumps our displeasure but that it nullifies our experience of unwanted attention as threatening.

Therefore the outrage at baby and elder rape is because these are children/women who lie outside the socially sanctioned bounds of sexual availability (because they are too young or too old), while ‘curative’/‘corrective’ rape is about ‘punishing’ women who lie within the sexual eligibility window for heterosexual male consumption, but they ‘dare’ not to be available – hence the belief that they deliberately choose to make themselves ‘unavailable’ to male sexual gratification, and can therefore be punished and/or violently recovered.

If Chapter 6 brings together a string of case studies, then Chapter 5 deals with only one: the 2006 Jacob Zuma rape trial. I could have chosen other very high-profile cases to focus on. However, this case was a watershed moment and instructive on many levels. My approach to this trial is not so much what happened inside the court case, but rather how the trial also played out in the court of public opinion. At the time, many of us argued that there was much about this particular rape case that reflected what happens in many rape cases across the country. At the same time, because it happened on such a large scale, many of the responses were amplified, perhaps allowing us to see them differently and clearly.

I have another motive for using this trial – it offers me an opportunity to examine the significant outpouring of support for the woman at the centre of the case – named Khwezi, to protect her identity – by feminists who wrote in to national weeklies, while also allowing me to see how those who were featured in the papers as unconditionally supportive of the accused Jacob Zuma spoke about their support. In the global obsession with South Africa as rape capital, you would be forgiven for thinking that there is no contestation and no active fight against rape by feminists, whatever the risk. Yet, at least in the field of contemporary South African writing – poetry, memoir, fiction – there is enough material for various books on the relationship between rape and the post-apartheid feminist imagination. This chapter is one of the places where I look at specific collective feminist energies against rape in the public domain. The One in Nine Campaign provided the most consistent support for Khwezi. It was formed specifically by organisations and individual feminists to support Khwezi in what was clearly going to be a highly publicised traumatic experience for her. Even as attacks on her were anticipated, I doubt any of the founding feminists understood the sheer scale of what she would confront. And I say that even as most of these feminists had extensive experience in anti-rape and anti-violence activism and professional work. Nonetheless, One in Nine Campaign members stood firm in purple shirts in support of Khwezi against a sea of supporters who sometimes travelled from other parts of the country to support Zuma. The purple pavement is real, and it may not be a majority movement that brings cities to a standstill, but it is not going anywhere. For as long as there is rape, there will be feminists who will fight it. We believe it is a fight that we cannot opt out of even if we want to. You can try to avoid sleeping to prevent a recurring nightmare, but sooner or later the human body shuts you down and the nightmare returns. In any event, even when we are wide awake, a recurring nightmare retains its grip on us though fear, memory and certainty of its return. It cannot be avoided. It needs to be confronted. In One in Nine, like other feminists everywhere in the world, we know that women cannot be free for as long as rape exists in the world.

Before the Zuma rape trial, I was much more hopeful about our fight against rape as a society, even confronted by the statistics. I believed most people when they said they opposed rape, even though I was very aware of South African hypocrisy when it comes to gender power. After the trial, having witnessed what happened outside, how far people were willing to go to terrorise a woman in defence of a powerful man, it is clear to me that something drastic needs to change before this culture consumes us whole. The One in Nine Campaign does not believe in violence, disavowing violence as a patriarchal weapon, and I have agreed to be bound by this kind of feminism. But there are times when I wonder what would happen if women fought back in defence of ourselves, in numbers and unapologetically. When I read Angela Makholwa’s superb novel Black Widow Society, the suspension of disbelief that works of fiction offer readers allowed me to entertain a different feminist position: one where women kill men who violate women, where women do so for themselves and in defence of one another. And there have been times when I have been convinced that the only reason the patriarchal siege continues unabated is because violent men know women will not rise up, take arms and collectively defend our own. It feels true sometimes. However, I also know that this does not make sense – everywhere in history there is evidence of people who defended themselves and broke regimes down yet globally white supremacy persists. Audre Lorde, whom a dear friend and sister prays to as “holy mother full of fire”, reminds us that “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house”. Violence is the master’s tool.

We need new tools, not in place of, but in addition to the current anti-violent strategies we have. Holding rapists accountable is a start. I am not saying that the young men on whose narratives I started this chapter were representative of rapists. They need not be. And, I am convinced that they are not. But they open the door to understanding how rape is possible: because to treat women as though they do not matter is deeply engrained in our culture as South Africans.

I will admit to being despondent about the state of violence against women in South Africa today. As I drive to work in the final days of writing this manuscript, all the radio shows are abuzz with news of Paralympian Oscar Pistorius being released on house arrest after serving only ten months for killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. I cannot tune out the news of the fact that the Stutterheim rapist, farmer William Knoetze, was sentenced to fifteen years for repeatedly raping three girls. And I am unable to erase from my mind’s eye the television news footage of a stone-faced former tennis superstar Bob Hewitt in court, nor his six-year sentence for raping a succession of girls. Perhaps he did not feel as nonchalant as he looked. With these and many other powerful, sometimes famous men in mind, I cannot accept the lie that poverty makes it more likely for men to rape. The image of poor, young Black men as the figures of the rapist is not the reality South African women live under. If that were so, then some groups of women would be safe when they lived lives that brought them into minimal contact with these men who are the face of the rapist in public discourse.

Rape is a crime of power, and in patriarchal societies, all men can access patriarchal power. Wealthy white men like Knoetze and Hewitt rape and those like Pistorius kill their partners, as do wealthy Black men. Quibbling over the class of rapist is a distraction. It misses the point. It also excuses those men who are poor and Black, pretending that those among them who choose to rape cannot help themselves, that they are victims of circumstance.

It is not true that ‘hurt people hurt people’.

Otherwise queer, working-class people of colour would be the most violent people on the planet.

It is condescending to poor people to suggest that these men cannot be held accountable for choosing to rape. It is also the most pernicious patriarchal lie that men – any men and all men — cannot help themselves when confronted by women’s bodies. It is rape culture. Rape culture renders rape acceptable.

Rape is never mild, never minor, never acceptable. It is not just sex. The cost to survivors who speak out is so significant that it does not make sense to fabricate rape except as an exercise in self-immolation because in patriarchal society, the dominant response to a human being ‘breaking the silence’ is disbelief. Therefore, those people who constantly say “but women sometimes lie” are part of the problem. Each time someone says, hears and believes that most women lie about rape – or that saying so is the legitimate response to someone telling you that s/he or they were raped – they make it more unlikely that someone else will speak of their own violation.

It is not immediately clear to me whether violence against women is on the increase or not. What does seem clear is the manner in which it seems to be more brazen, and I am not sure whether it is being reported more directly in the news and therefore more visible in its brazenness or whether there has been an upward turn. Given the fact that rape-reporting numbers are always much lower than incidents of rape, this is not a question we can confidently answer in the short term.

One thing is very clear to me about the numbers and statistics. In the immediate aftermath of April 1994, rape-charge statistics rose, not because rape increased in a new country, but because women felt more likely to be believed. We all believed that political power would make this possible, that freedom would mean that the police force and the criminal justice system would belong to us too. Many Black women would not have gone to a police station to report rape as readily under apartheid, whether their rapists were white or Black. Nothing about apartheid made Black women feel valued or taken seriously. Apartheid law treated women as minors who could not make any significant decisions in their own names, not even enter a contract for themselves. It punished those women who entered professional life for getting married, such as the fact that Black women teachers would lose their access to permanent employment as soon as they were married, exposing them to increasing vulnerability if the marriage did not work. Sindiwe Magona’s autobiographies To my children’s children/Kubantwana babantwana bam and Forced to grow are an incredible illustration of what could happen when a woman teacher plummets into poverty because she is married and her husband has abandoned her and their children. Magona’s autobiographies are worth reading for many more reasons, in addition to these.

At the same time, women activists’ autobiographies are rife with examples of how frequently sexual violence, rape and the threat of rape were used as a form of torture. How could women then trust police officers – some of whom had this approach to rape, and some of whom were proud rapists themselves – to do anything for them when they had been raped by non-policemen?

All of these problems are when talking about Black women who have been raped by Black men. Why would most white women raped by white men lay charges against them with police officers in a white supremacist patriarchal system that not only made white women minors themselves, but also constructed the cruel myth that white men could not rape? And what hope could Black women raped by white men have in an apartheid legal justice system?

Finally, given the constant active onslaught that apartheid was to Black life, policestations were not exactly a place we (as Black people) wanted to be anywhere near for any reason. In this context, many women felt that laying charges against Black men in such a system would render them complicit with the system. Here the choice was not a choice at all: handing over another Black person to a brutal racist state or placing your own vulnerability in the hands of a brutal racist state. This was not a state that invited confidence.

For vulnerable people who were not women, reporting rape also meant dealing with the kind of incomprehension and humiliation that comes with masculinist culture, such as the questioning of a man’s own masculinity in not being able to defend himself against another man’s violation. Rape is an exercise of patriarchal violent power against those who are safe to violate: mostly women, girls and boys but also adult men and trans-people deemed safe to violate. Queer desire and gender non-conformity were explicitly criminalised and policed in apartheid South Africa, thereby further dissuading gay men and transgender individuals from reporting rape.

Of course, many people fought all of these doubts and reported rape under apartheid, and their courage is remarkable. However, the hope that came with the end of apartheid and the ushering in of a new democracy that spoke directly about undoing not just racial oppression but also taking women seriously, and recognising the necessity of celebrating the full spectrum of gender and sexual rights, saw people’s confidence in the state soar. It is therefore not surprising that rape survivors expected that the post-1994 criminal justice system could offer them justice.

This dream and hope, however, was to be betrayed again and again from 1994. Rape survivors who have not already learnt this lesson will most likely do so if the current system remains unchanged. Many others also know that justice for most survivors of rape does not lie in the criminal justice system, and in fact, it may lie nowhere. Thus under-reporting to police will continue to be a feature. In South Africa, the Medical Research Council reported in 2005 that only one in nine women who are raped report it to the police. The other eight deal with their rape differently. Their mistrust of the criminal justice system is clear as they seek medical, counselling and other assistance to deal with their trauma, to find healing, resolution and sometimes justice. We will never know how many survivors remain silent foregoing assistance of any kind.

Many of us try to understand why rape is such a big part of South African contemporary life, and why it may be on the rise. Speaking as one of the panelists at the 2013 Thabo Mbeki Foundation’s International Women’s Day event, themed “OAU@50: Women at the Centre of Development: Celebrating women’s progress”, Thenjiwe Mtintso spoke about this relentless policing and violence as a crisis. The crisis, she argued, is the latest form of the backlash. In other words, it is a direct attempt to undo feminist work and gains. Yes, it is the ‘usual’ patriarchal violence in many senses. But it is also a patriarchy defending itself. It is not a coincidence that South African women, who, on paper are so empowered and have won so many freedoms, are living with the constant fear of violence when we cross the street, at work, everywhere. An effective backlash always does much more than neutralise gains, though; it reverses the gains we see everywhere and it reminds those who might benefit from such gains that they are not quite free. We can see the same thing in the US with a Black president and the constant violence by police and others on Black children and adults carried across the globe in news headlines. The sheer magnitude also makes us wonder about how much more violence goes unreported. It also creates a culture of instability and fear that reminds African Americans that they are not free and that they will pay for each gain. It is not new violence, and its targets are not just African Americans but Latinos, Latinas and Native Americans too, although the headlines do not always travel as far across the globe. The rape backlash that Mtintso speaks about proceeds along the same lines: it is not new, but it is more brazen. It is a critical time for feminists who already are so stretched and strained in this part of the world and continent.

In the midst of this backlash, public shaming and a criminal justice system that betrays them, women are repeatedly invited to break the silence. There is no silence. We know we live in the midst of a rape crisis.

It is time to apply pressure on men who rape, those who make excuses for rapists, those who make rape ‘jokes’, and to pressure our government to create a criminal justice system that works to bring the possibility of justice to rape survivors and all other survivors of violence. The silence we must now break is the silence around the identities of the rapists in our midst. It is no longer acceptable – or convincing – to pretend that men who rape women, children and other men are a small fringe minority of men we do not know. Most survivors know their rapists. It is simply not possible for a small minority of men to hold a country hostage in this way. And if it is, then we know who that minority is, so they need to be stopped.

It is also important for men who choose not to rape to stop being complicit and sometimes directly undermining attempts to end rape culture. Men who are not violent need to stop responding angrily to those who seek to end rape, accusing us of blaming all men, and requiring that we start by saying “not all men”. Men who do not rape have nothing to be ashamed of when rapists are held accountable. And they need to direct their anger at the men who make all of them ‘look bad’. They need to confront the men who rape and create rape culture, and stop sabotaging those who engage in a fight to end rape by insisting that any critique of endemic rape be prefaced with “not all men rape”.

For many survivors of violence, the only thing the criminal justice system offers is secondary victimisation. There are several examples in this book. There are millions upon millions more in the real world. It is crucial to focus on survivors and victims as we do in the work that tries to find healing and justice. It is also crucial to be honest about what we know, to render visible/audible what is obscured, but also to pay attention to the many meanings of silence, especially when they point to the limitations of litigation. There is no doubt that all of these feminist ways of thinking about violence have been invaluable.

But they also offer an opportunity to rethink our feminist work, especially when we think about the gains of such work. It is a success that feminist work has made it impossible for people to claim progressive politics without pledging commitment to anti-patriarchal ideas. Yet, we have not been able to move this beyond lip service in a society where men are routinely rewarded for being violent with better or unaffected career trajectories, loyalties and self-appointed armies coming to their defence. So, as in that much cited poem by Roshila Nair, a poem that I insert into Chapter 2 in this book, we need to break the cycles on hypocrisy. In South Africa, men acquire more kudos for speaking non-sexism and even feminism, but they still go home and act in misogynist ways with no real cost.

In recent years, there has been the establishment of a women’s Ministry, calling for President Zuma to fund an inquiry on gendered violence, to speak more strongly against rape. What does this call, this expectation, even creating this possibility, do? I understand that part of this is getting the president of the Republic to put money and resources in place so that anti-patriarchal work can happen further. What does it mean to ask this president to take anti-rape work seriously, after we lived through the brutalisation of Khwezi in more than one way? What does it mean for this to even be a call, and/or a reality, especially for those of us who believe Khwezi?

Jacob Zuma was acquitted of rape by a court of law, and those who call on him to make funds available, and to take a tougher stance against rape and other gendered violence point to this. However, whatever the court found, it did not absolve his refusal to limit the levels of brutality that happened in his name. When his followers terrorised Khwezi and her supporters, he did nothing to temper this even though they did it in his name. How do you think the millions of women who are rape survivors, who were raped by various men in 2006 felt watching what happens to women who speak out and those that support them?

Ending rape is going to require that we interrupt all the narratives of rape culture. It requires honesty about the fact that there are systems that support rape culture and that the ways in which we support rape survivors matters. I understand the sentiments behind wearing a certain colour – black or white – in solidarity with rape survivors. I wonder what it would mean if most of us required more of ourselves. While I also understand the symbolic value of walking in heels, possibly getting blisters in marches that show solidarity with the pain of living with patriarchal expectation, I wonder whether the message does not get lost in the fun and humour of such marches. More significantly, whether it does not allow us to go home and rest on our laurels because we did our bit to end violence. I am not knocking marches. That would be foolhardy, as would knocking people’s attempts to do something, to publicly announce that they are committed to ending violence. I am merely asking why we don’t do more that does not even require that we drive somewhere else: why we look away when a woman is attacked in public, why we avert our gaze when a gay man is mocked in our presence, why we say nothing when someone we know comments violently on someone else, diminishing them in the process.

In addition to the current strategies of marches and protests, we need to find new ways to make violent men unsafe and to end the impunity with which they enact violence. Many aspects of our public gender talk need revisiting. Many forms of violence happen in plain sight and sometimes with the active complicity of spectators. What are we saying to survivors of sexual assault when we ask them to break the silence even though we avert our gaze when other forms of violence and humiliation of people happen in our presence?

How can we shift our perspectives and behaviour in ways that make it harder for violence to happen in our presence? How can we render violators unsafe? Why is it that most of us look away even when the violators are in the minority and audiences in the majority?

Recently, in a conversation where we spoke about rape as endemic, and where we spoke about the routine abuse of school children by paedophiles in positions of power, one of my friends asked a question that caused us all to pause.

She asked, “What do we mean? What are you saying when you say it happened all the time in school?”

Think about that question for a minute before reading on. It is not as simple as it seems.

How we speak about and respond to violence matters. “It happens all the time” points to the crisis, debunking the myth that it is shocking and expressed in isolated incidents. That phrasing also suggests that it is commonplace, normal: “All the time”. It happens. The truth is that it does not just ‘happen’. Individuals choose to rape and they make this choice because it is an available one, and one that is mostly without consequence to themselves.

But there is a cost – a huge, devastating cost that comes with rape – an invisible wound that remains long after the physical scars (where these exist) have healed. And what a cost to us to have so many of our people walking wounded.

As a society, we can do so much better.