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

基于性别的暴力和性暴力是当今南非面临的一些最重要的问题，南非经常被认为是一个没有战争的社会中性暴力发生率最高的国家之一。在公共话语中，这种暴力经常被框定为种族隔离后的“危机”，而且在现在比过去一直更糟糕--比过去更严重、更残忍、更厚颜无耻。然而，这样的框定助长了对过往性暴力的历史遗忘，忽视了此类暴力及其影响的更长轨迹。南非的隐蔽战争是一个历史研究项目，探索了从20世纪40年代到21世纪初的种族隔离和后种族隔离早期，性别暴力和性暴力在南非是如何概念化、经历和应对的。在进行这项研究时，该项目还寻求开发研究过去暴力行为的创新方法和道德最佳做法。这项研究的结果将用于弥合南非研究人员和预防此类暴力的工作人员之间现有的纪律和部门分歧。该项目将促进当代对妇女过去生活和经历的更多了解，并在学者、活动家、非政府组织和暴力预防组织中促进对南非当前基于性别的暴力问题更长期历史的更多认识。由于其盛行，南非的当代性暴力是人类学家、心理学家和公共卫生学者研究的热门话题，大多数学者关注的是后种族隔离时期和男人为什么实施暴力这一关键问题。为了理解今天基于性别的暴力的高比率，这类工作经常转向过去寻找答案，在这个国家长期存在的殖民主义、种族主义和国家批准的暴力中找到答案。然而，性暴力本身的历史--它在过去如何被理解、经历和采取行动--仍然很少被探讨，特别是在种族隔离时期。因此，强奸被视为种族隔离的遗产，而不是发生在种族隔离期间的事情。女性的声音和经历在这项研究的大部分中也被忽视了，这项研究倾向于关注男性和男子气概。南非的《隐藏的战争》通过探索女性自己如何讲述和记忆过去生活和社区中的性暴力，回应了研究中的这些差距。这项研究是通过一种创新的跨学科方法进行的，包括三个主要方面：档案研究，用来追溯性暴力是如何被不同的历史行为者理解、辩论和解决的；口述历史采访了几代人和社区的妇女，以探索她们在更广泛的种族隔离及其后果记忆中对性暴力的意义；以及与妇女的焦点小组和讲习班，以调查她们自己对性暴力的概念、其肇事者和解决这一问题的手段。该项目与当地非政府组织和预防暴力组织直接合作，促进了这一方法。解决南非现有性暴力研究的不足是当务之急，以确保该国目前的性别暴力和性暴力“危机”得到适当的历史记录，并将妇女自己的声音和过去的经验纳入学术和暴力预防工作。通过其计划的学术成果、影响活动和数字档案，该项目将对全球性别和暴力历史学家、南非暴力问题跨学科学者以及参与南非当代妇女运动和暴力预防工作的个人和组织如何理解南非较长的性暴力历史产生持久的影响。

Gender-based and sexual violence are some of the most significant issues facing South Africa today, with the country often cited as having one of the highest rates of sexual violence for a society not at war. This violence is often framed in public discourse as a post-apartheid 'crisis' and as something that is consistently worse in the present - more profuse, brutal, and brazen - than it was in the past. Yet such a framing has encouraged historical amnesia about past sexual violence and ignores the longer trajectories of such violence and its impacts. South Africa's Hidden War is a historical research project which explores how gender-based and sexual violence were conceptualised, experienced, and responded to in South Africa across the apartheid and early post-apartheid periods, from the 1940s to early 2000s. In conducting this research, the project also seeks to develop innovative methodologies and ethical best practice for researching violence in the past. The results of this research will be used to bridge existing disciplinary and sectoral divides between those who research and work to prevent such violence in South Africa. The project will foster greater contemporary understanding of women's past lives and experiences and promote greater awareness of the longer histories of South Africa's current gender-based violence problem amongst academics, activists, NGOs, and violence prevention organisations. Due to its prevalence, contemporary sexual violence in South Africa is a popular topic of research amongst anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars of public health, with most scholars focusing on the post-apartheid period and the key question of why men perpetrate violence. In seeking to understand today's high rates of gender-based violence, such work often turns to the past for answers, finding them in the country's long histories of colonialism, racism, and state-sanctioned violence. However, the history of sexual violence itself - how it was understood, experienced, and acted against in the past - remains little explored, particularly over the apartheid period. Rape is consequently seen as a legacy of, rather than something that occurred during, apartheid. Women's voices and experiences are also overlooked in much of this research, which tends to focus on men and masculinity. South Africa's Hidden War responds to these gaps in research by exploring how women themselves narrate and remember past sexual violence in their own lives and communities. This research is conducted through an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology consisting of three main strands: archival research, used to trace how sexual violence has been understood, debated, and addressed by various historical actors over time; oral history interviews with women across multiple generations and communities to explore the meanings they attach to sexual violence within their broader memories of apartheid and its aftermaths; and focus groups and workshops with women to investigate their own conceptualisations of sexual violence, its perpetrators, and means of addressing the problem. This methodology is facilitated by the project's direct collaboration with local NGOs and violence prevention organisations. Addressing the shortcomings of existing research on sexual violence in South Africa is a matter of urgency to ensure that the country's current gender-based and sexual violence 'crisis' is properly historicised and that women's own voices and past experiences are incorporated into scholarship and violence prevention work. Through its planned academic outputs, impact activities, and digital archive, this project will have a lasting impact on how the longer histories of sexual violence in South Africa are understood by historians of gender and violence across the globe, interdisciplinary scholars of violence in South Africa, and individuals and organisations involved in South Africa's contemporary women's movement and violence prevention efforts.