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

今天，南非的性暴力发生率是所有非战争国家中最高的，估计每三名妇女中就有一名在一生中被强奸。尽管有公众的强烈抗议和新的政策倡议，但对南非强奸危机的理解仍然有限，这主要是由于两个因素：未能了解种族隔离和后种族隔离时期的性暴力历史;以及在研究或政策中忽视妇女自己的声音。针对这些限制，该项目将是第一个将南非从1948年至今的性暴力历史化的项目。它将通过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：妇女和女孩来做到这一点。它将探讨非洲妇女如何概念化，经历，并寻求正义，反对无处不在的暴力，塑造他们的日常生活，突出性暴力的经验如何发展和改变了种族隔离和后种族隔离时期。在这样做的过程中，它将通过鼓励更加重视妇女的声音，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。该项目将为研究性暴力历史制定一种新的多学科方法，其中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，它将克服研究人员过去遇到的许多挑战。这一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的重点小组。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为她们的性暴力经历发声和寻求支持。这些讲习班将以当地语言进行，并由在乡镇社区享有长期声誉的妇女共同举办。该项目还将与南非的其他非政府组织合作，包括九分之一运动、Sonke性别公正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。重点小组将有益于乡镇妇女，为她们提供一个安全的空间来表达各种经验和理解，并表达她们的需要和要求。Khulumani还将从这项研究中受益，通过推进他们的新项目，增强妇女反对暴力的能力，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制最佳做法文件、政策简报和讲习班来确保，这些文件和讲习班将强调当前的发展举措如何能够最好地理解妇女自身遭受性暴力的经历并从中吸取教训。公众将通过媒体传播和数字化档案与更广泛的受众接触。解决南非现有性暴力研究的不足之处是当务之急，以便认识到当前强奸危机随着时间的推移而发生的历史发展，并将妇女自己的声音纳入学术和发展实践。通过采取历史方法，并就妇女长期遭受暴力的经历提出问题，该项目将促进对南非强奸的更具体的历史和文化理解-这是以有效方式解决该国当前危机所必需的知识。在这样做的过程中，它将弥合研究、非政府组织和决策者之间的分歧，这些分歧以前阻碍了理解或解决性暴力问题的努力，并强调利用跨学科方法实现联合王国解决暴力侵害妇女和女孩问题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.