Austerity: another form of violence which harms women

THE story of gender-based violence (GBV) in South Africa is a story of a nation that is at war with the women and children of this country, President Cyril Ramaphosa said recently.

South Africans have become inured to the horrors of statistics and headlines that have come to characterise the country as one of the rape capitals of the world.

Notwithstanding the overwhelming compassion fatigue arising from the headlines and statistics, it is worth repeating that one in five women has experienced physical violence by a partner, according to Statistics South Africa’s 2021 Crimes Against Women in South Africa report.

Even more sobering is the fact that more than 10000 cases of rape were reported between July and September this year, according to the SAPS. These statistics are chilling, especially as GBV remains largely underreported and unprosecuted.

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.

This is the violence that gives rise to hashtags that implore us to #Sayhername and ask if #AmInext?

But violence doesn’t just live in the fists of men we call “monsters”. It also lives in institutions, systems, policies and regulations, norms and cultures that perpetuate the devaluing of women, girls and gender nonconforming people.

Violence also manifests itself 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 – and has always been – inherently violent.

“Patriarchy is brutal… It deploys entire institutions explicitly and through deception,” writes Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola in Female Fear Factory.

Understanding the role of institutions in building rape culture and in giving it legitimacy is necessary to “temper our expectations that these same institutions will offer a way out of the very system of violence they have helped to shape,” writes Gqola.

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.

A report released by Oxfam to mark the global campaign of 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence – titled “The Assault of Austerity” – outlines how global economic policy choices are a form of GBV.

According to the report, 54% of governments plan to decrease their social protection spending.

The report says that “cuts to public health and care services have increased mortality and morbidity, primarily among the most marginalised in society. Women, as the main users of these services, have carried the consequences of those cuts at the physical, emotional and psychological level.”

Yet governments, which continue to mismanage public funds and 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 as the increase in VAT and cuts in social public spending.

Austerity is a policy choice that entrenches the status quo. It renders those who are already disempowered, even more so by invisible and powerful violence that shields the rich.

The fight against GBV is futile if it doesn’t seek to address the causes and manifestations of economic vulnerabilities that are embedded in the country’s structures, systems and institutions.

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.

“As the world navigates what has been dubbed as the three Cs – Covid, conflict and the climate crisis – it remains clear that at the heart of the complexity of all these is the domination of a neo-liberal world order.

“South Africa’s neo-liberal order remains steeped in the racist heteropatriarchal order that denied access to black women and girls while expecting them to shoulder the burden of an unequal race-based political economy.

“The 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,” says Gqola.

Austerity is economic violence that will continue to act as a silent killer unless South Africa begins to recognise that the institutions we have inherited cannot offer us a way out of the violence they helped to shape.