South Africa's Hidden War: Histories of Sexual Violence from Apartheid to the Present

Summary
Gender-based and sexual violence are some of the most significant issues facing South Africa today, with the country often cited as having one of the highest rates of rape for a society not at war. This violence is often framed in public discourse as a post-apartheid 'crisis' and as something that is consistently worse in the present - more profuse, brutal, and brazen - than it was in the past. Yet such a framing has encouraged historical amnesia about past sexual violence and ignores the longer trajectories of such violence and its impacts. South Africa's Hidden War is a historical research project which explores how gender-based and sexual violence were conceptualised, experienced, and responded to in South Africa across the apartheid and early post-apartheid periods, from the 1940s to early 2000s. In conducting this research, the project also seeks to develop innovative methodologies and ethical best practice for researching violence in the past. The results of this research will be used to bridge existing disciplinary and sectoral divides between those who research and work to prevent such violence in South Africa. The project will foster greater contemporary understanding of women's past lives and experiences and promote greater awareness of the longer histories of South Africa's current gender-based violence problem amongst academics, activists, NGOs, and violence prevention organisations.
Due to its prevalence, contemporary sexual violence in South Africa is a popular topic of research amongst anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars of public health, with most scholars focusing on the post-apartheid period and the key question of why men perpetrate violence. In seeking to understand today's high rates of gender-based violence, such work often turns to the past for answers, finding them in the country's long histories of colonialism, racism, and state-sanctioned violence. However, the history of sexual violence itself - how it was understood, experienced, and acted against in the past - remains little explored, particularly over the apartheid period. Rape is consequently seen as a legacy of, rather than something that occurred during, apartheid. Women's voices and experiences are also overlooked in much of this research, which tends to focus on men and masculinity. South Africa's Hidden War responds to these gaps in research by exploring how women themselves narrate and remember past sexual violence in their own lives and communities. This research is conducted through an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology consisting of three main strands: archival research, used to trace how sexual violence has been understood, debated, and addressed by various historical actors over time; oral history interviews with women across multiple generations and communities to explore the meanings they attach to sexual violence within their broader memories of apartheid and its aftermaths; and focus groups and workshops with women to investigate their own conceptualisations of sexual violence, its perpetrators, and means of addressing the problem. This methodology is facilitated by the project's direct collaboration with local NGOs and violence prevention organisations.
Addressing the shortcomings of existing research on sexual violence in South Africa is a matter of urgency to ensure that the country's current gender-based and sexual violence 'crisis' is properly historicised and that women's own voices and past experiences are incorporated into scholarship and violence prevention work. Through its planned academic outputs, impact activities, and digital archive, this project will have a lasting impact on how the longer histories of sexual violence in South Africa are understood by historians of gender and violence across the globe, interdisciplinary scholars of violence in South Africa, and individuals and organisations involved in South Africa's contemporary women's movement and violence prevention efforts.

This project engages with four main stakeholders: 1. African women and their wider communities; 2. South African NGOs, CSOs, and policy organisations working on sexual violence, including Khulumani, One in Nine Campaign, Sonke Gender Justice, and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR); 3. International NGOs and policy organisations, including DFID, UN Women, the Gender-based Violence Prevention Network, and the International Centre for Research on Women; 4. The wider public, including students, activist groups, and other research-interested publics in South Africa and the UK.
African women are at the heart of this project. By focusing on their experiences, this project seeks to write a new history of sexual violence that counters previous trends of excluding women's perspectives, instead focusing only on men. By employing inclusive and collaborative research methods, it will address women's absence from academic and popular narratives of rape and sexual violence in South Africa. To do so, the project relies on its partnership with Khlumani, and the hiring of local translators. Wider township communities will also be involved in the research through oral history interviews and the dissemination of information pamphlets in local languages that provide an accessible overview of the research findings. The project also entails producing a digitised archive of 60-100 women's oral histories plus the material shared and collected in focus groups, which aims to make these women's voices heard by wider publics within and outside South Africa. This archive will function as a publicly accessible database that can be used by students, academics, policy-makers, activists, and journalists, and by African township communities themselves. This resource will enable African women's voices to be more easily incorporated into research, policy, and practice.
Identifying the current neglect of women's voices in discussions of sexual violence, a 2017 CSVR report wrote of how explanations of such violence 'have either been developed independent of women's actual experiences, or, at best, may have been informed by limited fragments of such experiences.' This project directly addresses the need to give women's voices on sexual violence a platform in both academic research and development practice. NGOs working with women in South Africa will be involved in all stages of the research. Already, they have been consulted in the drafting of the research questions. The project partner, Khulumani, will collaborate in running the focus groups and producing and disseminating materials that result from this, including local language pamphlets, posters and artwork. By establishing a new Women and Violence Network which brings together NGOs, policy groups, and academics working on rape and abuse, the methodologies and results of this research will be shared and discussed across sectoral and disciplinary boundaries. Together, we will create a best practice document for accessing and sharing women's experiences of sexual violence, and then share this with other NGOs and policy groups at the Network workshops. In years 5-7 of the fellowship, this best practice document will be shared with larger, global facing groups and institutions such as the UN Commission on the Status of Women and the Gender-based Violence Prevention Network, to give the South African context an international platform and to ensure that the findings of this research can be incorporated beyond South Africa where applicable. These efforts recognise and seek to address the centrality of ending violence against women to the Millennium Development Goals and UK development strategy.
Wider publics (including students) will be engaged in the research through the digitised archive, and through wider media work, including working with South Africa and UK-based journalists and radio programmes to publicise the research work and findings.