The discovery of the bodies of eleven women in Ekurhuleni has once again brought terror into the everyday lives of women across South Africa. Women know this fear. It is the calculation made before walking home, using public transport, going running, entering a relationship or leaving one. Every new killing is a brutal reminder that, for millions of women, the right simply to move through society without fear of violence remains unrealised. Police are investigating the murders and possible connections between them; those responsible must be found and brought to justice. Police have not established that all nine killings were committed by the same perpetrator. (AP News)
But fear has not been the only response. The killings have provoked anger and collective action. Women, community members and organisations have gathered in protests, pickets, vigils and memorial events demanding justice and action against gender-based violence. A petition has also called for a permanently funded specialised task team to investigate serial rape and murder. (Reuters) These actions express a refusal simply to accept the violence or retreat into private fear. Grief, anger and fear are beginning to find collective expression in demands for action and accountability.
Those demands must be acted upon. The killings must be properly investigated, those responsible must be found and brought to justice, and the state must provide the resources required to protect women and investigate violence against them. But even an effective investigation confronts us with a deeper question: why has violence against women become so deeply embedded in our society?
The MWP rejects the idea that this violence can be understood simply as the actions of exceptionally evil individuals. We live in a society in which violence has repeatedly been normalised as a means of asserting power over others—most brutally over those considered weaker, subordinate or disposable. Women and children experience this constantly. We have also seen this logic expressed through xenophobic violence against migrants and refugees, including attempts to prevent foreign nationals from accessing hospitals and clinics and attacks upon people seeking safety from xenophobic violence. These forms of violence are not identical. But they reveal how readily the rights, dignity and physical safety of particular groups of people can be disregarded.
The oppression of women did not begin with capitalism. It emerged historically with the development of class society, private property and social relations in which women’s sexuality, reproductive capacity and labour became increasingly subjected to male and class power. Capitalism inherited that oppression, transformed it and entrenched it for its own purposes. It drew millions of women into social production while continuing to rely upon their unpaid labour in the home. It pays millions of women poverty wages while depending upon their caring labour to reproduce the workforce. It has turned women’s bodies, sexuality and even ideas of beauty into commodities from which enormous profits are made.
This is why the struggle against gender-based violence cannot be separated from the struggle against the conditions that reproduce women’s subordination. A woman without an independent income, secure housing, affordable childcare or functioning public services has fewer material choices when confronted by violence. None of this means that poverty mechanically produces GBV, or that better wages alone will abolish sexism. It means that freedom from violence requires women to possess both the material means to control their own lives and the collective power to transform the society in which those lives are lived.
The answer therefore cannot be to teach another generation of women how to live more carefully inside an unsafe society. Nor can it be reduced to ever harsher punishment after women have already been violated or killed. The call for the return of the death penalty is an example of how women’s oppression can itself be exploited by right-wing pro-capitalist forces to advance authoritarian measures. It diverts attention from the social conditions in which violence against women is reproduced while opening the door to attacks on democratic rights that can ultimately be used against the working class as a whole.
We must fight for a society in which women have the economic independence, social provision, democratic rights and collective organisation necessary to exercise real control over their lives.
We refuse to organise our lives around fear.
Let us organise to change society.
The MWP Women’s Committee invites women to read, criticise and help develop our Platform and Programme of Action for Working-Class Women—not as the final word on women’s liberation, but as a contribution towards building the organised social force capable of fighting for it.
Read the Platform. Send us your comments. Join the discussion.