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

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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.