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

Today, South Africa has the highest rate of sexual violence for any country not at war, with an estimated one in three women raped in their lifetime. Despite public outcry and new policy initiatives, understandings of South Africa's rape crisis remain limited due to two main factors: a failure to understand the history sexual violence across the apartheid and post-apartheid periods; and the neglect of women's own voices in research or policy. Addressing these limitations, this project will be the first to historicise sexual violence in South Africa from 1948 to the present. It will do so through an innovative focus on those most affected by this violence yet currently most neglected in research: women and girls. It will explore how African women have conceptualised, experienced, and sought justice against the ubiquitous violence that shapes their day-to-day lives, highlighting how experiences of sexual violence developed and changed over the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. In doing so it will reframe historical and contemporary understandings of sexual violence on a global scale by encouraging a greater emphasis on women's voices and promoting new methodologies for accessing, sharing and incorporating such marginalised voices into research and policy.
This project will develop a new multi-disciplinary methodology for studying histories of sexual violence, involving substantial collaboration with local NGOs. By crossing discipline and sectoral boundaries, it will overcome many of the challenges researchers have met in the past. This approach includes oral history and archival research, as well as focus groups with African women from the country's townships. These will be hosted in collaboration with the project partner, the Khulumani Support Group - an organisation committed to helping women voice and seek support for their experiences of sexual violence. These workshops will be conducted in local languages and co-run by women with longstanding reputations in township communities. The project will also work in collaboration with other NGOs in South Africa, including the One in Nine Campaign, Sonke Gender Justice, and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
These collaborations will aid both the research and its future impacts. The focus groups will be beneficial to township women, providing them with a safe space to express a range of experiences and understandings, and giving voice to their needs and demands. Khulumani will also benefit from this research by progressing their new project in empowering women against violence, raising their international profile, and fostering new understandings of the historical roots of women's current vulnerabilities. These impacts will be ensured through the co-creation of best-practice documents, policy briefings, and workshops that will highlight how current development initiatives can best understand and learn from women's own experiences of sexual violence. Public engagement with broader audiences will take place through media dissemination and the digitised archive.
Addressing the shortcomings of existing research on sexual violence in South Africa is a matter of urgency in order to recognise the historical developments of the current rape crisis over time, and to incorporate women's own voices into scholarship and development practice. By taking a historical approach and asking questions about women's experiences of violence over time, this project will foster more historically and culturally specific understandings of rape in South Africa - knowledge essential for tackling the country's current crisis in effective ways. In doing so, it will bridge the divides between research, NGOs, and policy makers that have previously hampered attempts to understand or address sexual violence, and highlight the importance of using interdisciplinary methodologies to deliver the UK's development priority of tackling violence against women and girls.

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.