Remember back at the end of October when those Hilton boys made the grave mistake of posting a staged rape onto one of their Instagram accounts? Yeah, well, that’s pretty much the basis of this article, written by Sisonke Msimang for The New York Times.

While the scene was captured in a curiously modern fashion, its implied brutality was as old as time. There was a small public uproar, but it soon died down. The boys received no more than a slap on the wrist for their staging of a simulated rape. None were expelled.

And it’s true. Even among some of my own privileged male friends, the boys were laughed at for being so stupid to post it onto social media, but “we all did it” was a common sentiment. And so, Msimang compares that to our dear old friend, Oscar Pistorius:

Mr. Pistorius, who went to an elite high school in Pretoria (Pretoria Boys High), has much in common with those privileged Hilton students. South African boys of their class seem raised to believe that they can get away with egregious acts of violent misogyny. Until recently, Mr. Pistorius appeared, like them, to have escaped censure.

So are his actions actually a by-product of a South African culture of privilege he grew up in?

Of course, not all South African men are violent, but an extraordinarily high proportion are. According to a 2009 survey by South Africa’s Medical Research Council based on more than 1,700 interviews, more than one in four men admitted to rape, and of those, 46 percent said that they had raped more than once. Earlier research, conducted in three of South Africa’s nine provinces, found that between about a fifth and a quarter of women had been physically abused by their intimate partners.

Although this kind of violence is generally pathologised as a “black” issue, or one of poverty, it actually shows that it crosses the boundaries of race and class.

The global auditing firm KPMG estimated in 2014 that gender-based violence costs the South African economy about $3 billion a year (calculated at the time of the report), or roughly 1 percent of gross domestic product, in a country struggling to achieve economic growth.

And what has the country done about it? Nothing. Well, almost nothing. The government has passed a “slew of laws aimed at punishing perpetrators of rape and intimate-partner abuse” but they have failed to tackle the root of the problem within the South African culture. Even the result of Oscar’s trial has lacked any movement by the population to change the mass amount of gender-based violence. However, there is evidence that provides ways to tackle the issue:

There is evidence that when boys are consistently taught to respect women and girls, over time their behavior improves. For example, a program in South Africa known as the IMAGE Study has found that combining gender training with microfinance initiatives (to empower women economically) has been enormously successful. Intimate partner violence decreased by 55 percent in the rural province where the project had its trial.

Yet, as with most issues in our country, there lacks the governmental inspiration or direction to implement any of these changes in mindset.

Others in the nonprofit sector who are better qualified find their efforts hampered by the overwhelming demand for services. Gender violence projects are also not easy to win funding for. Although South Africa is classified as a middle-income country, activists found themselves in the absurd situation last year of having to appeal to international donors to keep open the doors of the country’s oldest center for rape survivors.

On average, 118 women report to the police that they had been raped every day while three women are killed at the hands of a partner. And yet, no one talks about it. Or acts upon it. The notion of sexual violence is left to those who experience it and when they do attempt to talk about, they are silenced by the very kind of men who are associated with those who do it. Think of that UCT rape opinion peice and the way the institution attempted to silence 2oceansvibe on the very matter.

White privilege is real thing and women are perpetuating it by excusing the men in their life for things they say and do by laughing it off. Even it makes them really uncomfortable.

[source: thenewyorktimes]