It will take more than the new Domestic Violence Act to free abused wives from the shackles of shame that keep them silent, writes PHYLICIA OPPELT
HE told me he loved me, he told me he couldn’t live without me. He said he would commit suicide it I didn’t marry him. In the end, I said yes. I loved him too”. As she sits in her lawyer’s office in Johannesburg, Susan Patterson (not her real name) recounts her marriage of 15 years to man who “gave her hidings” broke her jaw, slammed her fingers in the door, demanded sex after each fight and insisted she was a useless wife.
Her seeming tolerance of his abuse has earned her the contempt of her daughter. Patterson recalls her asking “How can I respect you when you allow these things to happen to you” But, while horrific, Pattersons account of years of abuse is not extraordinary. Domestic violence is as old as the rhythm of childbirth. In South Africa and elsewhere, domestic abuse has no grand pattern – it happens in a council flat on the Cape Flats in the Western Cape, a shack in Soweto or a mansion in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs.
Newspapers carry articles about sport stars, white collar workers and street cleaners who appear to believe a relationship includes the gift of a free punching bag, both emotional and physical. We all see the woman with the dark sunglasses, we all hear the explanations about walking into doors.
Certainly, Patterson’s white middle class background did not exempt her from becoming a domestic abuse statistic; neither did it protect her from an assault so severe she nearly miscarried her second child. The new Domestic Violence Act is meant finally to break the shackles of shame, as family lawyer Graeme Greenstein describes the intimidation that chokes women into silence. It recognises domestic violence as serious crime against society and acknowledges the permanent damage that children suffer even if they are not assaulted.
The Act affords the courts and police wide-ranging powers from that allowing them immediately to remove abusers from the family home to that giving them the authority to order abusers to pay emergency monetary relief.
It increases the scope of exactly what domestic violence means to include aspects like economic abuse, where men deprive their partners of money. It acknowledges the need for preventative measures and recognises the potential danger of stalking, harassment and abusive telephone calls. According to the Justice Department, the Act will be Implemented as soon as magistrates. advocates and the police are fully trained in the various aspects of the law. Yet any law can appear wonderful in the statute books. It is enforcement that transforms it Into an agent of change. Women need to know there are real alternatives and, more significantly, that they have rights. They need to know the police will not shrug off their calls as just another case of huismoles or ask them what they did to provoke attacks. Beyond laws and enforcement, SA is an inherently patriarchal society in which male behaviour is laughed off with “boys will be boys”
As a transformed country, we easily pat ourselves on the back for the number of women in Parliament and the upwardly mobile sisters doing things for themselves. Their number, however, remains insignificant compared with the number of women who have little economic means and a lack of marketable skills and education. In the US black men marched on Washington DC in 1995 to reclaim their pride as breadwinners, husbands and fathers. Led by the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, they vowed: “I pledge from this day forward I will never abuse my wife by striking her, disrespecting her, for she is the mother of my children and the producer of my future South Africa’s men have not stepped out in their thousands to acknowledge domestic abuse. Instead, we have a gender commission that speaks on the behalf of women.
