<\/p>\n
By Vuyokazi Futshane<\/p>\n
Austerity is an invisible and deadly form of violence, precisely because we cannot see, hear, touch, taste or smell it.<\/p>\n
The story of gender-based violence in South Africa is a story of a nation that is at war with the women and children of this country, said President Cyril Ramaphosa recently. <\/p>\n
South Africans have become inured to the horrors of statistics and headlines that have come to characterise the country one of the rape capitals of the world.<\/p>\n
Notwithstanding the overwhelming compassion fatigue arising from these headlines and statistics, it is still worth repeating that one in five women has experienced physical violence by a partner, according to Statistics South Africa\u2019s 2021 Crimes Against Women in South Africa report.<\/p>\n
Even more sobering is the fact that over 10 000 cases of rape were reported between July and September of 2022, according to the South African Police Service.<\/p>\n
These statistics are chilling especially as gender-based violence remains largely under-reported and unprosecuted. Although there are different forms of violence, this is the one spoken of the most. <\/p>\n
This is the violence we can see, hear and almost smell. It is the violence that has women and girls looking over their shoulders when crossing the street after dark. The violence that has a face splashed across our papers and social media, when yet another woman has been brutally murdered.<\/p>\n
This is the violence that has become normalised as part of our social fabric. This is the violence that every so often sparks a surge in media reports, the violence we associate with protests and calls for justice. <\/p>\n
This is the violence that gives rise to hashtags that implore us to #Sayhername and ask if #AmInext?<\/p>\n
Violence in South Africa is widespread, palpable and expected \u2013 women and girls live with the fear of becoming the next one of the \u201cone in three\u201d women who has experienced violence. <\/p>\n
But violence doesn\u2019t just live in the fists of men we call \u201cmonsters\u201d. It also lives in institutions, in systems, in policies and regulations, in norms and cultures that perpetuate the devaluing of women, girls and gender non-conforming people.<\/p>\n
Violence doesn\u2019t only leave black and blue eyes, bruised lips and broken bones. It also manifests in the invisible ways in which systems and structures strip women, girls and gender non-conforming people of their social, political and economic agency and renders them powerless at the mercy of an exclusionary heteropatriarchal capitalist economy, which is \u2013 and has always been \u2013 inherently violent.<\/p>\n
\u201cPatriarchy is brutal. It is normalised in public and private spaces. It deploys entire institutions explicitly and through deception,\u201d writes Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola, in Female Fear Factory.<\/p>\n
Understanding the role of institutions in building rape culture and in giving it legitimacy is necessary to \u201ctemper our expectations that these same institutions will offer a way out of the very system of violence they have helped to shape\u201d, writes Gqola.<\/p>\n
Women, mostly black poor women and other marginalised members of our society, continue to suffer the most from the hidden brutality of socio-economic exclusion.<\/p>\n
A report released by Oxfam to mark the global campaign of 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence \u2013 entitled The Assault of Austerity \u2013 outlines how current global economic policy choices are a form of gender-based violence.<\/p>\n
Oxfam\u2019s research on austerity as violence, finds that austerity measures \u201care largely defined by rapid and deep cuts to public spending (frequently education, health and social protection), often alongside increases in tax revenues, specifically via regressive or indirect means, rather than taxation on wealth\u201d are steadily gaining traction in many governments around the world.<\/p>\n
Fifty four percent of governments around the world plan to decrease their social protection spending.<\/p>\n
Oxfam\u2019s report further highlights how austerity measures operate to widen the inequality gap, and entrench women, girls and non-binary people deeper into poverty. <\/p>\n
The report says that \u201ccuts to public health and care services have increased mortality and morbidity, primarily among the most marginalised within society. Women, as the main users of these services, have carried the consequences of those cuts at the physical, emotional and psychological level\u201d.<\/p>\n
Yet governments who continue to mismanage public funds, fail to curb corruption and accept loans from international financial institutions despite ever increasing public debt, have tended to resort to policies that make up budget deficits by regressive tax measures, such the increase in VAT and cuts in social public spending. <\/p>\n
This, while ignoring progressive equitable alternatives such as for example a wealth tax, despite that \u201cpost-pandemic recovery for the world\u2019s poorest people will take more than a decade, while it only took nine months for the fortunes of the top 1 000 billionaires worldwide to recover\u201d.<\/p>\n
Austerity is a policy choice that entrenches the status quo and continues to enable the exploitation of the marginalised. It takes no cognisance of the well-being of women, girls and non-binary people in favour of the needs of the 1%. <\/p>\n
It renders those who are already likely to be disempowered, even more so by an invisible and powerful violence that shields the rich, who face little or no economic consequences when regressive measures are applied.<\/p>\n
Austerity is an invisibilised type of violence. Its danger lies precisely in the fact that we cannot see, hear, touch, taste or smell it, yet it causes immeasurable harm to women, girls and gender non-conforming individuals and leaves them completely at its mercy. <\/p>\n
Embedded into the structures of our country, the lives and bodies of women and girls are the coals that continue to feed its fire.<\/p>\n
The fight against gender-based violence is futile if it doesn\u2019t seek to address the causes and manifestations of economic vulnerabilities that are embedded in the country\u2019s structures, systems and institutions. <\/p>\n
These structural inequalities have created \u2013 and continue to contribute \u2013 to the devastating levels of gender-based violence and femicide in South Africa.<\/p>\n
Feminist economic alternatives offer alternative paths to ending austerity: adopting feminist budgeting and taxation, investing in public goods, services and infrastructure, and ensuring decent work and comprehensive social protections.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs the world navigates through what has been dubbed as the three C\u2019s \u2013 Covid, conflict and the climate crisis \u2013 it remains clear that at the heart of the complexity of all these is the domination of a neo-liberal world order. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe same neo-liberal order is deeply patriarchal, and we know that women continue to shoulder the biggest burden,\u201d writes Crystal Simeoni Director of the Nawi \u2013 Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective in the foreword to Oxfam\u2019s Assault of Austerity.<\/p>\n
South Africa\u2019s neo-liberal order remains steeped in the racist hetero-patriarchal order that denied access to black women and girls while expecting them to shoulder the burden of an inherently unequal race-based political economy.<\/p>\n
\u201cCovid-19 has highlighted an already existing logic: factories and industry are the backbone of the capitalist economy,\u201d writes Gqola. Under capitalist economies, such as ours, human life is disposable.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe hardest workers are the most disempowered, are easy to replace, receive the lowest compensation for their labour and do not own the product, nor the processes, distribution or profits,\u201d says Gqola. <\/p>\n
Austerity is economic violence that will continue to act as a silent killer unless South Africa begins to recognise \u2013 as argued by Gqola \u2013 that the institutions we have inherited cannot offer us a way out of the violence they helped to shape.<\/p>\n
* Vuyokazi Futshane is a project officer at Oxfam South Africa.<\/p>\n
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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