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

CHAIRPERSON: Sheila, thank you very much for what you have presented before us.  I just want to, in thanking you, indicate that most of the examples you have referred to were confirmed by quite a number of women yesterday, that definitely, in this country, sexuality has been an instrument of war and I would also indicate as a challenge to you that, as a Commission, we will highly appreciate it if bodies like yourself can take a much deeper look at issues, to articulate issues which make is almost impossible, especially for women and politics to separate themselves from their political parties and articulate gender experiences of human rights violations.  That is still a challenge and ...

DR MEINTJIES: I think the challenge is to all of us as men and women to organise ourselves to ensure that gender is a priority in the Government.  It is an issue that really has not found enough support.  It has, I think, it is a bit like a mantra in the society and we need to avoid that.

CHAIRPERSON: Actually, I was interrupted, I was just saying there are areas which you still think we need well though through formulations as to what are stumbling blocks, but also it is important what you have said that when reporting to the President it will be important to make sure that the whole report is gender sensitive.  That is an important point that you have made.  I will give this opportunity to Commissioners to ask you one or two questions, although normally we do not ask people who are giving a perspective a question, but as a researcher, it is different.

YASMINE SOOKA: Sheila, I just want to explore two points you make.  The one is about the link between sexual crimes during the times of political violence and the spill over into the present crime situation.  I was wondering if you could just explore that a little.

DR MEINTJIES: I think it is always a very difficult issue to prove.  However, I think there is, the point is that if you look at what happens during peace time and what happens during war there is a continuum of behaviour and, in our view, this links to the way in which woman are constructed in civil society.  Not just in this one, but across the globe the subordination of women is a global phenomenon and it is a historically global phenomenon.  It is not a new phenomenon.  One would have hoped that by the end of the 20th century you might have seen a shift away from this construction both in the private and in the public realms, but we have not.  What we are seeing at the end of the 20th century, in fact, is an increase in violence against women, an increase in the trafficking in women and this is something that the global order, in affect, needs to come to grips with, because it is hampering the full development of society.
 We need to understand that we have to change both the norms and the structural relations in society not simply at the level of the Law.  We have very good Laws in this country.  We have an excellent Constitution.  We now have to implement them by making it deeply rooted in the society and the major problem in the society is violence against women.  It is probably the single most shared experience of women across class, across race, across culture.

YASMINE SOOKA: Just another question which is that you talked about the ambiguities when one actually moves from the realm of State relations to, in fact, the question of what happened in townships and in exile as well and that, certainly, is a problem in that there is a greater reluctance to talk about that and I wonder if your research has actually been able to explore that more fully.

DR MEINTJIES: Well, I would like to say that we tried.  We tried very hard not to detract from the achievements of the political movement, but really to come to grips with the issue of the experience of violence and the violation of women in townships, in the movement and women were extremely reluctant to speak.  Understandably I think, but we wanted to break that silence.  There has not been enough debate in the society, in the movement about the issue of gender power relations.  In our submission, the big submission, we interviewed Tenjiwe Mtinso who describes her treatment by junior, more junior officials, by more junior members of Umkhonto we Sizwe who threatened her with rape.  She is a senior commander.
 Now, what is going on there?  It is saying you may well be my senior commander, but at the end of the day you are merely a woman.  There is there embedded in that relationship a struggle over gender power that needs, that we need to understand very clearly.  It is part of the resistance of men in the society to acknowledging that women are their equals, not just in a formal sense, but in a real sense.  We may have sexual differences and that may lead to different activities, but we each, men and women, have equal responsibility for bringing up children and for engaging in the society, in building the society.  Most women in this society work, as a matter of course.  Nobody can afford not to anymore and yet women still bear the brunt of the responsibility for running the home and bringing up children.  Now, those things need to be looked at in new ways and men need to take more responsibility and it is reflected in those kind of relationships that we are talking about and a movement like the ANC, which has the moral high ground, in a sense, needs to be signalling that this is a priority, but it is not.  It is not doing that and we can see that in many ways.  
 The Government has given the Gender Commission R2,0m.  It is R4,0m less than the Human Rights Commission which has said that it cannot function with R6,0m and that is probably one third, again, of what is given to the Youth Commission and yet women form 52% of the population.  Our priorities are skewed and we have to reassert where the priorities ought to lie.

YASMINE SOOKA: Just one last comment which is the, in your recommendations you talk about an institute to continue this research, but surely the research into the question of gender abuses during the past, do you not see that as, perhaps, something which the Gender Commission can, in fact, take on once the Commission has finished its work?

DR MEINTJIES: I would love to say yes, but the Gender Commission has got a budget of R2,0m which barely covers their salaries, wages, shall I say.  I think it would be, I think that we need to spread the load.  We cannot land the Gender Commission with all the tasks that need to be undertaken.  I think that the apartheid experience is a particular experience that we need to be able to bring to the surface and so we need to recommend to the President that more funding ought to be given to this kind of work and counselling, for example.  It is not just going to be women, it is going to be men, it is going to be children who have been through the most terrible experiences.
 We need to have the framework and the services to try and meet that kind of need and we are seeing now, 50 years after the Second World War, suddenly we are seeing the emergence of experiences that had been little heard of in the past, that people were afraid to talk about.  We are going to have the same thing in South Africa and we need to have contingencies in place to deal with those things.  The Gender Commission is not going to be the only arena for that.  I think there is a great deal that we need to do in terms of reconstructing the society that the Gender Commission is going to have to deal with.

CHAIRPERSON: I will ask Joyce Seroke to ask you a few questions.