• DOI:10.1086/676895
• Corpus ID: 143151249

Shifting Meanings of Postconflict Sexual Violence in South Africa

@article{Toit2014ShiftingMO,
  title={Shifting Meanings of Postconflict Sexual Violence in South Africa},
  author={Louise du Toit},
  journal={Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society},
  year={2014},
  volume={40},
  pages={101 - 123}
}

• L. D. Toit
• Published 1 September 2014
• Psychology
• Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

In this article, I identify four interpretive frames that have been or may be used to make sense of the high incidence of rape in contemporary postapartheid South Africa, namely, past perpetrator trauma, current socioeconomic exclusion, patriarchal politics, and ontological violence. This analysis aims to present each of these as a kind of story or narrative within which the phenomenon is framed, thus setting out a rough typology of rape interpretations. Each frame is then critically considered in terms of criteria such as its compatibility with the available statistics and known patterns of rape, its internal coherence, its inclusivity (accounting for the perspective of both perpetrators and victims), whether it does justice to the nature of rape, its probable effect on society, and in particular whether it furthers or obscures insight into a broader South African culture of complicity with rape. I conclude that the first two frames, the most prevalent discourses around rape, tend to adopt an uncritical perpetrator perspective, to “other” perpetrators, and ironically to privilege the perpetrator over the victim. Thus, they tend to play a powerful ideological role in society as a whole. The last two frames are more promising, but I show that the political interpretation of rape as instrumental violence needs supplementation through an understanding of rape as ontological violence.