by Jacinta Nandi
An actress friend had to play a black South African woman in a voiceover recently.
“I’m a bit worried, really.” She told me beforehand. “They’ve got a white South African for the white South African role. We’ll be recording and she’ll be giving me all these sceptical looks.” So we did what we always do in these situations, i.e. YouTube research. We’ve spent many a Saturday night in this manner – watching video clips from documentaries about shoplifters in Leeds, or farmers in Jamaica. But the only thing is, when you type in the words “South African women” to YouTube, all you get is stories about corrective rape. It’s just corrective rape after corrective rape after corrective rape.
“It’s a bit bloody depressing isn’t it,” said my friend after the fourteenth clip. “It must be really shit to be a South African woman, when just watching videos about them on YouTube is so exhausting.”
Okay, so what is corrective rape? Well, basically, it’s when lesbians get targeted and subjected to gang rape and severe violence – by men trying to cure them of homosexuality. We Europeans might find the idea alone exhausting, but for girls and women living in South African it’s part of daily reality.
Gay women are living in fear of brutal assaults by male gangs. Some might get raped and beaten but left to live. Some, like Eudy Simelane, who played for South Africa’s national football team, are raped, beaten and then murdered. Simelane was a high-profile campaigner for women’s rights and one of the first women to come out as a lesbian in Kwa Thema, her district of Johannesburg.
Human rights activists say that due to an extremely macho culture of impunity, the government isn’t doing enough, and that corrective rape should be re-classified as a hate crime in order to force the police to take more action.
“How can they do that, those men?” I asked my friend after we’d turned the PC off.
“There’s always been an element of punishment to rape, hasn’t there?” She said.
And there has, hasn’t there? That’s what rape is really – a punishment. When I was sixteen, I used to go clubbing with two friends every Friday – Jayne and Sara. It was one of those clubs that has so many minors in it’s really more of a youth club than a night club. Sara and I were short brunettes – we were barely five foot – and Jayne was a tall, blonde. Sara and I, we thought we were the attractive ones – but Jayne and the boys in the club didn’t agree.
“Don’t you think Jayne’s a slag, how she flirts with all the bouncers?” Sara asked me in the toilets, and I agreed readily.
“Yeah, she’s a right slag,” I said. “She just loves attention.”
“You know what That Tony told me? That fat, old one? He said they’re gonna take her out in a car to Hainault Forest and rape her.”
“What,” I said.
“That’s what he says they’re gonna do,” said Sara.
“She won’t go,” I said. “She won’t go off with all those lads in a car.”
“Well, if she does, it’ll serve her right,” said Sara, with satisfaction. “It’ll teach her not to be such a slag, anyhow.”
I really wasn’t that much of a feminist at sixteen – I’m not just saying it, I really wasn’t – but Jayne was our best friend, and, despite a couple of BJs here and there, officially a virgin.
“But we have to warn her,” I said. “We have to tell her not to go, we have to tell her what they’re gonna do.”
Sara sighed, defiantly, sceptically, resignedly. You know how good working-class women can sigh sometimes.
“We can’t do anything, Jacinta,” she said. “She’s such a slag, she won’t listen. She’s got it coming to her.”
Jayne never got raped by a bunch of bouncers in the end. But it was no thanks to us, was it. Solidarity was a foreign word for us, it was. Maybe you think moving away from Essex made things better. But you know something? The kids I hung out with in Exeter and the kids I hung out with in Essex – their accents were different, but their attitudes to rape were pretty much the same.
It wasn’t like rape didn’t happen, though. I knew a lot of girls who’d been raped, but who didn’t report it. There was no point, was there – it was always date-rape, even if we didn’t go on dates much.
“You know Katie says she got raped?” I told a friend, Rebecca. “From that Mark. He was sleeping in her bed.”
“Oh, fucking hell,” Rebecca said. “It’s not rape if you let them sleep in your bed.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But he did force her, you know. He came inside her and everything. But I told her not to go to the police. I mean, she didn’t want to.”
“Course she didn’t.”
“They slept together, ages ago, three months or something. And she’d snogged him in the club, and he’d paid for the taxi. So I told her not to go.”
Thing is, you have to understand, she was so little, Katie. I took her to get the morning-after pill, but I was too scared to take her to the police station. And she didn’t want to anyway. But I kept on thinking about it, afterwards, feeling guilty, feeling worried. I knew I’d done a cowardly thing. I was worried I’d done a cowardly thing.
“There was no point,” I said.
“Of course there was no point,” snapped Rebecca peevishly. “She was a fucking prick-tease. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s fucking prick-teases. She got what was coming to her.”
There’s an element of punishment to all rape – maybe you’re teaching a woman to be a woman, maybe you’re teaching her not to be a slag. Maybe, like the men who raped Mukhtar Mai, you’re punishing her for something someone else did. In 2002 Mukhtar’s teenage brother was accused of having an affair with a girl from another tribe - a tribe with higher social standing. When the traditional village court ordered that Mukhtar should be gang-raped as punishment, four men dragged her into a barn and raped her.
In Pakistan, the shame associated with this kind of rape means that many women and girls punished in this manner end up committing suicide. But Mukhtar didn’t – instead she took her attackers to court and was awarded around $8,000 compensation, which she used to start a school. Her actions have helped to start shattering the stigma attached to rape-victims in Pakistan. A few years ago, the BBC ran an interview with her on the world service. I wrote down a quote of hers and sent it to myself in a text message. It was a bit of a tacky quote, really. It was the kind of quote you could get on a postcard or something. It went:
“Human beings are very weak, but when they are supported, they can be very strong.”
We should never forget that, I guess. Human beings are very weak, but when they are supported, they can be very strong. Human beings are very weak, but when we are supported, we can be very strong. You know? And so, that means, we have to support each other. We have to have solidarity. Solidarity with those poor girls in South Africa. Solidarity with girls in Pakistan. But also, you know, solidarity with your girlfriends in school and Halls. There’s an element of punishment to rape. But let’s not participate.
