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

如今，南非的性暴力率是所有非战争国家中最高的，据估计，三分之一的女性在一生中被强奸。尽管公众的强烈抗议和新的政策举措，对南非强奸危机的理解仍然有限，主要原因有两个：未能理解种族隔离时期和后种族隔离时期的性暴力历史；以及忽视女性在研究或政策方面的声音。为了解决这些限制，这个项目将是第一个将南非1948年至今的性暴力历史化的项目。为此，它将创新性地关注受这种暴力影响最大、但目前在研究中最被忽视的群体：妇女和女童。它将探讨非洲妇女如何认识、经历和寻求正义，反对影响她们日常生活的无处不在的暴力，重点介绍在种族隔离时期和后种族隔离时期，性暴力的经历是如何发展和变化的。在此过程中，它将通过鼓励更多地强调妇女的声音，并促进新的方法来获取、分享和将这些边缘化的声音纳入研究和政策，从而在全球范围内重新构建对性暴力的历史和当代理解。该项目将发展一种新的多学科方法来研究性暴力史，涉及与当地非政府组织的大量合作。通过跨越学科和部门界限，它将克服研究人员在过去遇到的许多挑战。这种方法包括口述历史和档案研究，以及与来自该国乡镇的非洲妇女进行焦点小组讨论。这些活动将与项目合作伙伴Khulumani支持小组合作举办，该组织致力于帮助妇女就其性暴力经历发表意见并寻求支持。这些讲习班将以当地语言进行，由在乡镇社区有长期声誉的妇女共同开办。该项目还将与南非其他非政府组织合作，包括九分之一运动、Sonke性别正义和暴力与和解研究中心。这些合作将有助于研究及其未来的影响。焦点小组将有利于乡镇妇女，为她们提供一个安全的空间来表达各种经验和理解，并表达她们的需求和要求。库鲁马尼还将从这项研究中受益，因为它将推进其新项目，增强妇女的反暴力能力，提高她们的国际形象，并促进对妇女当前脆弱性的历史根源的新理解。这些影响将通过共同编写最佳做法文件、政策简报和讲习班来确保，这些讲习班将强调当前的发展倡议如何能够最好地理解和学习妇女自身的性暴力经历。公众将通过媒体传播和数字化档案与更广泛的受众进行接触。为了认识到当前强奸危机随着时间的推移的历史发展，并将女性自己的声音纳入学术和发展实践，解决南非现有性暴力研究的缺陷是一件紧迫的事情。通过采用历史方法并询问妇女长期遭受暴力的经历，该项目将促进对南非强奸的历史和文化特定理解，这对于有效解决该国当前危机至关重要。在此过程中，它将弥合研究人员、非政府组织和政策制定者之间的分歧，这些分歧以前阻碍了理解或解决性暴力的尝试，并强调了使用跨学科方法来实现英国解决针对妇女和女孩的暴力的发展优先事项的重要性。

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.