Less Effective Laws (Continued)

(This is a continuation of the preceding post.)


Stricter controls surrounding gun ownership have come into effect in the last couple of years and exclude anyone with prior convictions of domestic abuse from obtaining a license. The problem, says groups like POWA, is that in many cases women do not report abuse to the police or are intimidated into withdrawing charges, so that a history of violent behavior often goes undetected.
Lisa Vetten, program manager for gender violence at CSVR, said there was evidence of a history of abuse in 20 percent of cases where women were killed by their partners, but that women only laid charges in three percent of cases.
"A lot of women are actively encouraged by the police not to pursue charges," Vetten said. "I think not all of them [the police] take domestic violence as seriously as they should."
In many cases, she added, women might not know they had the right to have a gun removed and the police failed to notify them or to proactively confiscate weapons from abusers.
Groups like POWA and Gun-Free South Africa, an anti-gun lobby group, are working to educate women about their legal rights, and provide skills development to police, court officials and health workers who come into contact with women experiencing domestic violence.
Meanwhile, grisly stories about men killing their partners or even their entire families before killing themselves continue to be splashed across the pages of South African newspapers on an almost weekly basis.
Vetten confirmed that cases of intimate femicide-suicide in South
Africa have increased and that the proliferation of guns was probably a major contributing factor. But both Vetten and Shelver disputed the commonly held notion that the prevalence of gun violence and intimate femicide in South Africa was simply the legacy of the country's apartheid years.
"Violence against women is a global phenomenon," said Shelver. "Lower levels of such violence exist in countries with better laws to protect women."
Getting Through To Men
According to Moloko, the reasons men gave for shooting their partners were often mundane, but the underlying motivations were the desire to assert power or control. Such motives might have more to do with male socialization than South Africa's violent history.
The Men as Partners (MAP) Programme, an initiative started by the international NGO, EngenderHealth, and run by a network of affiliates throughout the country, works to challenge male assumptions about gender and encourages men to take a stand against domestic violence.
EngenderHealth's programme manager for South Africa, Dean Peacock, suggested that in a society where men have lost both income and jobs, they might use gun ownership and violence against women as ways to regain their sense of power.
After going through a series of workshops, male participants often began to question their definitions of masculinity, including the equation of manhood with violence towards women.
"I grew up in an environment where beating ladies was the order of the day, and it just made you think it was normal," said MAP workshop facilitator Li Buthelezi. "If I was pissed [drunk] I would just lift my hand and 'klap' [slap] her a couple times - it was just me showing my manhood. After MAP you start seeing women differently; you see them as equals."
Abrahams believed that given the proper allocation of resources and training, the Domestic Violence Act, combined with new laws governing gun ownership, could have an impact on levels of gun violence against women. The key, said Abrahams, lay in the level of commitment to implementation by government and police.
In Shelver's view, it was effective implementation that was still lacking.
"In practice, there are a lot of problems around implementation. The problem is not getting gun removal into the protection order, but in getting police to implement it," she said. "In some cases guns are removed and then handed back."
* This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations

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