Women standing up against violence

Reclaiming Women's Spaces - New Perspectives on Violence Against Women and Sheltering in South Africa
Edited by Yoon Jung Park, Joanne Fedler and Zubeda Dangor.
2002
Published by Nisaa Institute for Women's Development
406 pages

Reviewed by Moira Richards

South Africa boasts one of the world's highest rates of reported domestic violence, although the actual figures are elusive. Some statistics state that one quarter of South African women suffer assault at the hands of the men they love, others say that most of these women don't even mention the abuse, much less lay a charge with the police. Whatever the numbers may be, the fact remains that the incidence of domestic violence is inexorably on the increase in this country.

In 1998 South Africa legislated a new Domestic Violence Act in acknowledgement of the extent of this social problem and in an attempt to offer protection, via the issue of a protection order, to its victims. The Act was particularly welcome because it recognised a broadened definition of 'domestic relationship' and of 'domestic abuse'.

"This book should be compulsory reading for every person involved in the management of women's shelters"

However, the Domestic Violence Act does not address the underlying reasons of why the abuse occurs, nor does it provide necessarily, a long-term solution for the women who are trapped in this kind of relationship. A few (too few) non-governmental initiatives have been implemented in South Africa to try to redress these short-comings, one such being the establishment of some dozen domestic violence shelters throughout the country. The shelters are independently funded and operated, and each offers the unique service that it is best able to provide.

Phambili (a Xhosa word meaning Onwards!) is the name of a gender violence strategy that was started about four years ago in the small town of George (in the Western Cape, one of South Africa's nine provinces) under the auspices of the town's Business and Professional Women's Club, and together with many other volunteers from the community. This multi-faceted project includes a domestic violence legal advice desk and a shelter for battered women and their children.

The legal advice desk operates from the local magistrates' courts. Volunteers are trained in the workings of the Domestic Violence Act and they are available to comfort, assist and advise members of the public who need to apply for a protection order in terms of the Act. The Phambili domestic violence shelter houses up to 30 women with their children for a period of three months. During this time the clients are encouraged to participate in an extensive empowerment programme designed to enable them to function more competently in their communities upon their return.

I used to meet regularly with the shelter staff of Phambili and so I was very interested to discover the recently published Reclaiming Women's Spaces – New Perspectives on Violence Against Women and Sheltering in South Africa edited by Yoon Jung Park, Joanne Fedler and Zubeda Dangor. I turned immediately to read first, the last chapter of this book, entitled "Challenges for and Risks of Shelter Workers" because I was curious about the 'Challenges' in the title, and perturbed to see 'Risks'.

This book should be compulsory reading for every person who is involved in the administration or management of women's shelters – especially those who do so from a relative distance. Those like me who have read all the feminist theory and who zip in and out of the shelter for a couple of hours a week to do a job of fundraising or budgeting or project appraisal. As the chapter's authors say, the profession of shelter worker is one that is relatively new and therefore unexplored. Nevertheless, their research shows that shelter workers are usually underpaid, over worked, subjected to unacknowledged stresses and inadequately debriefed.

The Phambili shelter manager has recently been appointed to the project's board of directors. If organisation constitutions are changed so that such representation at board level becomes mandatory, then perhaps the sheltering business will be able to avoid falling into the trap of contributing to the abuse of women (i.e. their shelter workers) whilst trying to redress the abuse suffered by their clients?

I continued to read through this book in a haphazard way, lighting on another, and then on just one more section that had to be read before I had to sit with it in orderly book-review mode.

I think that many people who work in the shelter movement in South Africa, feel as if they do so in isolation. Initiatives such as the Western Cape Network on Violence Against Women and the South African Women's Shelter Movement have helped to facilitate an exchange between South African shelters. But there are barely a couple of dozen domestic violence shelters in the whole of South Africa, and so they remain isolated geographically from one another as well as, often, from the other needs of the communities in which they function. Chapters seven through nine of the book investigate the South African and global histories of sheltering as an antidote to domestic violence. They discuss the debate around the effectiveness of sheltering as a solution for this particular social evil; they take the reader on a tour of South Africa's shelters and even let us inside some of them. These three chapters share with the reader, the daily challenges that anyone from one of the many facets of such a project might encounter.

The Western Cape, published a "Draft Policy Framework for Developmental Social Welfare" in October 2001. This document emphasises the importance of non-hierarchical involvement with decision-making, from all the stakeholders of a social service project, and particularly of input from the project's clients – who should be best able to provide information on their own needs, as well as to give feedback on the effectiveness of the particular social welfare project that has hoped to improve their lot.

One of the challenges that faces Phambili is to find a way for its clients to contribute to board decisions – without them feeling intimidated, and without them having to have their communication filtered through an hierarchy. The importance of this type of contribution to a sheltering project was emphasised to me by a number of short testimonies that illuminate "Reclaiming Women's Spaces". Still not able to reach chapter one, nor even the introduction, I was side-tracked this time by the discovery of seven poems and personal testimonies, written by survivors of domestic violence, and interspersed between chapters through the book. It would be very easy for the average reader to filter these accounts through a protective layer of dissociation, but for anyone who works in the domestic violence sheltering system, it should be impossible to avoid facing the experience of those whom they would help.

The second section of this book, chapters seven through eleven, is invaluable as a hands-on manual for people who work against domestic violence. The information has been compiled from the contributions of women who have been intimately involved with sheltering work – women who are shelter managers, client counselors, and former shelter clients. The first section, no less compelling for being read second, is a fascinating and comprehensive collection of information on the ways that South Africans have struggled (not in vain) to combat violence against women.

These chapters describe the history of violence against women in South Africa and around the world. There are discussions of why this social evil has been able to reach epidemic proportions, and there are analyses of its far-reaching and often unsuspected consequences. The authors have gathered together a gold mine of information; they have documented much of the work that has been accomplished in South Africa over many decades by our legal, political and NGO structures. They have also ferreted out many personal accounts from the people who have encountered these systems in one way or another. And the text is illustrated with a few of South African cartoonist, Zapiro's cartoons from the late 1990s – the kind of cartoon that would be funny were you not crying; the kind of cartoon that might explain why feminists are said to lack a sense of humour.

The research in Reclaiming Women's Spaces includes findings right up until its publication. I do hope that funding can be found for the issue of periodic updates to this work; it is located in a rapidly moving field of work.

Moira Richards is a South African who reviews feminist writing for a number of print and online publications. She can be found lounging about the staff rooms of womenwriters.net and moondance.org