Special Hearings — Women's Hearings — 1997-07-29

DR MEINTJIES: Thank you very much.  First of all I would like to say that I am here on behalf of a wider group including individual trauma counsellors and psychologists and the Gender Research Project of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies and members of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.  We have been meeting consistently over the last 18 months in a group which we call Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  We submitted an earlier submission in August 1997 although the TRC received it in May.
 We emphasised in that submission the different experience of men and women during the apartheid era.   In particular we pointed to the significance of gender interwoven with race and class as an important category in determining this experience.  These and other efforts of women to highlight the particularity of women's experience led the TRC to hold separate women's hearings and we commend this very important process.  Now we do not wish to cover all the same ground which is detailed in our submission although there are particular aspects of gender that we would like to highlight.
 We want to emphasise that men and women experienced sexual torture, electric shocks to genitals and to women's breasts were commonplace, for instance.  We also want to point to an issue which was of concern to us more than a year ago and remains a key problem in our view.  We suggested that the issue of sexual violence, in particular, was one which women found and still find very difficult to speak out about or even to admit that it happened.  Indeed, we know that very few women have, in fact, come forward to recount their experience of sexual abuse in the context of political violence.  Of nearly 9000 cases of violations only about nine have claimed they have been raped.  Yet, in our research we came across many cases of violations which could be described as rape or where women knew of others who had been raped.  
 In one case a rat had been pushed up a woman's vagina and the detainee, Elaine Muhammad, who described this case said that she always felt that the rats were gnawing at her.  In her account, which she gave to Diana Russell and which is, in fact, published she described how sexual terrorism was used to instill fear into her while she was in detention.  Her humiliation was used as a tactic to undermine her sense of self and her integrity as a human being and as a woman.  She was body searched, she was forced to stand astride and do star jumps naked.  She described how the District Surgeon put his forearm between her legs and fondled her buttocks and made her walk across the room naked when he was examining her.  This, a medical professional, who was supposed to be maintaining the highest ethics.
 In the 1980's FEDTRAW, the Federation of Transvaal Women, described the violation of women and girls during States of Emergencies.  Now, we could describe these in detail, they are described in great detail in our submission.  I do not know whether you would like me to spell this out here.  You would like me to go into some detail about some of the events which happened.  Now, in our submission what we do is we describe a whole range of human rights violations.  We describe and try to place in context an understanding of gender and political violence.  In this context, what we do is to discuss the issue of women as direct and indirect victims of apartheid and we show how, as indirect victims, their experience as wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, the experience of hardship, the loss of loved ones, economic and cultural loss which they sustained as a result of their partners, fathers, etc, being removed into prison or, in fact, being killed.  We discuss, also, the constructions of gender in prisons, we discuss the ways in which women experienced torture, in a particular way in which their sexuality was used to undermine their sense of integrity and their sense of self and I can draw attention to some of the points that we make.  
 We talk of physical methods of torture which include assault, electric shocks on pregnant women, inadequate medical care leading to miscarriages, we talk of teargassing, of solitary confinement, of body searches and vaginal examinations, we talk of rape and forced intercourse with other prisoners, foreign objects, including rats, being pushed into women's vaginas.  Jessie Dwate, Nombula Mokonyana spoke of incidents where women's fallopian tubes were flooded with water, sometimes resulting in the ability of, inability of those women to have children.  These forms of cruelty were not simply experienced by women, but also by children.  During the States of Emergency girls as young as 14 were detained, tortured, beaten and teargassed.  
 We offer a comparative dimension in looking at similar experiences in Latin America during the 1960's and 1970's and we try to draw parallels of that experience in trying to explain where this kind of treatment comes from and, although in this, in our submission we do not look at the issue of male prisoners, we show that, in fact, men probably experienced very similar things and different forms of sexuality were played upon by the torturers in trying to undermine the integrity of both men and women.  Male prisoners, for example, were forced to live as if they were women and, for the first time, they came to understand what it meant to be constantly aware of their bodies, to be ridiculed, to be battered.  
 Women were ashamed to speak of their torture and, in the same way in South Africa where sexual assault is common knowledge, women are also afraid to talk about these assaults according to people who have worked with detainees.  It is clear from South African accounts and parallel international experience that the differing constructions of gender shape their experience and treatment.  Although studies of political violence do not highlight men's gender experience of their torture, studies or ordinary prisoners reveal systematic attacks on their masculinity.  An interesting hypothesis suggests that sexual torture of men aims to induce sexual perversity and to abolish political power and potency whereas behind the sexual torture of women, is the activation of sexuality to induce shame and guilt.  
 The intent of all of this is to break down the fabric of society and to break down the political will and resistance of those who are being tortured.  One could argue that sexual assault in the context of political detention and the war are institutionalised acts which make public the private.  We then go on to deal with particular kinds of assaults and we use examples from the experience of particular political prisoners.  For example, Jenny Schreiner described how physical violence she experienced while being tortured came as a particular shock to her as a middle class White women and she describes in graphic detail how Mostert, in fact, tortured her in a particular way, but she argues that my response was that all Section 29, sorry, I am just, I need to rephrase that.  In her statement to us she describes how she was forced to do things she did not want to do and at first she felt capable of doing that, but in time, this was undermined and her sense of confidence in her own position began gradually to be eroded and she describes how she was physically picked up and slammed against a wall.  
"I mean, he did not shatter my skull or anything, but it is a clear statement from step one.",
she says.  
"He was saying, I am in control of this, I am bigger than you, I am more aggressive than you and I have no respect for you.",
 and there, I think, that is also a question of it being a gender thing and this issue of respect is very important and it is one I want to come back to a little bit later.  The issue of women's position in society in general being one of secondary status, of lacking respect of society as a whole. 
 Women described, also, the rape and the threat of rape in detention.  One detainee described how women had been raped in detention,
"... and you yourself while you are there ...",
she said,
"... you have that fear the whole time that you can be raped.  It is a constant fear.".
Tenjiwe Mtinso described the very same thing, how the fear of rape is always present for women detainees.  She may not have described her own experience of torture in detention yesterday, but she described to us how, at one point in her detention, her head was used as if it was a ball and for the whole day, kadung, kadung, kadung, her head was bounced against a wall as if it was a basket ball and she feared constantly that she may be raped.  
 Another way in which women experienced torture was being told that their children were very ill or that their children were dying or that their children had died.  This they did to Mama Sisulu and they did it also to Tenjiwe Mtinso.  Elaine Muhammad described how, she said, 
"The way women experience detention is totally different from the way men do.  I burst into tears when a security policeman said to me, I really enjoy interrogating women.  I can get things out of them and do things with them that I cannot do to a man.".
Say that to a 21 year old woman and you put the fear of rape into her mind immediately.  She said, 
"I was terrified by this statement.  I felt horror and pain about it when I was physically hit by the police and I think the police realised this immediately.  I was body searched twice a day, I remember police women making me strip in front of men and people laughing at me.".
Another way of torturing women was to withhold medical care.  Mrs Mandela, herself, was withheld medical care when it was feared that she might have a miscarriage in prison.  They would not let midwives attend to her.  That is what, the evidence from Albertina Sisulu.  Then there were psychological forms of torture.  The attack on women's identity as women.  An anonymous detainee,
"I think detention does effect us in the same way to a certain extent, but a lot differs in terms of how you actually in detail, how you actually experience detention.  To start with the attitude of the police towards you.  You may try many ways to make you feel that you should not be here, a woman should not be here.  You are here, because you are not the right kind of woman.  Constantly undermining women, saying you are the equivalent of a whore to be doing this.  You are irresponsible, you are an unnatural woman, an unnatural mother.  They say all sorts of things to you.  You worry a lot about responsibilities outside prison, your responsibility.  Children are removed from their mothers.".
Jenny Schreiner described how the Security Police would search for the areas of vulnerability in a detainee and then they would hone in on those areas of vulnerability, undermining the person, trying to make her, Jenny, feel diminished as a woman.  
"Ruthless prying ...",
she said,
"... into an area of a person's personal life that they knew was vulnerable.  That all the kind of personal pain of a marriage that does not work is brought to the fore and in a context where they were going to send you back to a police cell to sit with nothing other than the emotions that you had scratched upon.  You are 30, you are single, therefore there is something wrong with you as a woman and that is why you get involved with politics.  They were attacking your identity with their own particular conception of what a woman is.".
Now, in our research we bring all of these issues together and we suggest that there is a systematic undermining of women's sense of their self, of their sexuality in order to undermine their sense of political commitment, their sense of belonging to a community and when women left detention, went out of detention they experienced a great deal of silent pain which they were not able to express and very often they also experienced a kind of secondary victimisation.  
 Now, one of the things that we want to talk about in our submission is what we call the ambiguities and the silences which surround the experience of sexual violence. I have already touched on these, but I would like to develop a point.  In the case of the experience of sexual assault at the hands of the police there should be no ambiguity, but, of course, we have found that there is, in our experience and it is, perhaps, not too difficult to understand the shame that is experienced there.  It is when we move from the terrain of State action to the more private realm where we need, I think, to look a little bit more carefully at what has been happening in South Africa, the experience in the townships and in the exile camps where silence and ambiguity have also asserted themselves.
 We do not want to leave a legacy in which past behaviour of a violent, yet sexual nature is excluded from the view of the TRC.  I think yesterday we got our first glimpse of some of the issues that we want to bring to the fore.  In the case of sexual assault there is a link between domestic violence and political violence and we need to understand that there is a continuum of behaviours which cannot be condoned and which we need to come out and stand firm about.  We would like to raise the issue of rape as a particular kind of crime against humanity.  Common in all situations of war and civil war, but it is also a crime which is common in times of peace, in situations of peace and in our society it is a particularly wide spread occurrence during this period of transformation and transition.
 It cannot be dissolved from the personal and, in our view, it cannot either be disconnected from the whole way in which women are conceived in civil society, as subordinated often treated as secondary citizens and so the question arises, should the crime of rape receive amnesty?  The TRC needs to send a message that this cannot be tolerated at any time.  We feel strongly that the need, that we need to remove the ambiguity and the silence about this experience and take a moral stand to condemn it in the highest possible terms.  It is not enough for an organisation or a political party to report that sexual violence, including rape, occurred as did the African National Congress.  
 We can applaud and, indeed, we do the fact that it is the only organisation to admit and acknowledge sexual torture and sexual violence, but we need to be quite clear in our condemnation of this kind of behaviour and of the euphemism and ambiguity lodged in its submission.  The point is that women have been silenced.  Many are too afraid to come forward, to come out on a limb in a situation where life goes on and where they find themselves in an ongoing set of power relations which structure their positions and their future.  Their positions may well be jeopardised if they come out about their experiences.  We are pretty sure that women throughout the organisation have experienced sexual harassment or sexual abuse of some kind and many women carry the pain inside them.  
 We need, at the end of the Commission's life, to be able to carry the process itself beyond the end point.  Our concern is that the politics of gender power is something which continues.  Victims and perpetrators are with us still, crimes of sexual violence blur with the political.  In our submission we describe gangs of youth, some of them demobilised young Comrades, for example, who have formed themselves into a group called SARA, South African Rapists Association.  These youth roam the streets, disciplining young women whom they see as snobs, women who will not subordinate themselves or refuse to go along with these youth.  The discipline is rape.  
 We witness the rape of a Black woman in very recent times, Nomboniso Gasa, on Robben Island by a discontented former warden who sees transformation in terms of insecurity and job loss and we see a former security policeman killing his own wife.  These are the legacies of the past, but they are also the legacies of gender, power relations.  The lack of respect which is accorded to women in this society and this is a culture that we have to change and the TRC needs to do this in the strongest possible terms.  
 Now, it in this context that we would like to recommend and to call for a process beyond the life of the TRC.  First of all, we recommend that the TRC or some process that sets up an institute, and we will recommend a Peace Institute, which continues the research into the past and brings these to the public's attention.  I think that what the TRC has done has to open up, has been to open up a process which may well just be the tip of the iceberg.  We call for further efforts and opportunities to be made for women to speak out.  It might take ten or 20 or 30 or even 40 years for women to acknowledge their experiences as it did for the women in South East Asia or for the victims of the holocaust to acknowledge sexual abuse by Nazi camp commanders.
 We believe, thirdly, that it will be imperative to have ongoing social support and reparation.  Not just in terms of individuals, but a whole structural process of provision through the State and civil society which provides psychological, health, social and economic upliftment.  Our final plea is for a Peace Institute to be established as a living monument in memory of this very dark period of our history.  In conclusion we would like to say that the final report and information produced by the TRC needs to avoid treating the experience of women as simply a chapter, but, rather, it needs to take the view that gender relations inform our entire history and gender relations determine the shape of everybodies experience in this society both in the past and in the present and, no doubt, in the future.  It shapes the experience of men and women and children.