A Submission To The Truth And Reconciliation Commission

Prepared By Beth Goldblatt And Sheila Meintjes

May 1996

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Table of Contents

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) will play an extremely significant role in shaping South Africa's collective understanding of our painful past. It will also have to deal with the individual victims, survivors and perpetrators who come before it and will have to consider important matters relating to reparation and rehabilitation. All South Africans will in one way or another be touched by the truth and reconciliation process. We will argue that by viewing our past through a gendered lens we gain a deeper understanding of how our particular history has shaped the lives of all South Africans.

A gendered approach requires that we look at the way society locates women and men in relation to all areas of their lives, such as the workplace, the domestic sphere and the civic life of the community. In South Africa, race, class and gender have together, but in different ways, structured social relationships. In this conceptualisation, women's experience cannot be understood in isolation from men's, but as a consequence of the interrelationship of women and men's roles and statuses in society generally. In the past and the present women have been and are subordinated to men. This constrains the full development of men as well as women. To transform this imbalance will require measures directed at restructuring all social relationships in all spheres of society.

It is with this understanding that we may be better able to construct a new society based on a human rights culture which allows all people, women and men, to contribute fully to society and develop to their full human potential.

This submission was initiated at a workshop held on the 19th March, 1996 at the University of the Witwatersrand. The workshop, entitled "Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission" was called by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies to further develop a process of thought about the gender issues facing the Commission. A number of psychologists, lawyers, members of Non-Governmental Organisations, members of the Gauteng Legislature and representatives of the Commission were present. The workshop, while simply a collection of interested people, included representatives from each of the four regions of the TRC. The participants felt that the issues raised in the workshop should be placed before the TRC in a formal submission. We hope that this submission will be of assistance to the Commission in fulfilling its important role.

This submission is intended only as a starting point to aid the Commission in understanding how gender forms part of the truth and reconciliation process. We have explored some of the issues that need to be looked at further and we certainly do not believe that this is the final word on any aspect covered in the submission. We have drawn upon comparative literature in an endeavour to provide a framework within which to understand how gender has affected women's experience during the three decades that form the review period of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We have drawn upon the work of people who have written about their own or other people's experiences of human rights abuses. We have also interviewed a number of women whose experience we believed would be useful in helping us to draw out possible trends during the three decades which are the concern of the TRC. This framework will need to be further developed and refined as more evidence of this gendered experience becomes available in the course of the Commission's hearings.

The interviews we conducted were in-depth, where our informants gave of their time and spoke openly and frankly about their experiences. We wish to acknowledge the assistance given by all of these remarkable women whose insights provide the major substance of this submission.

We have focused on the experience of women alone and have not explored how gender structured the male experience of our past. We acknowledge that by not exploring how men's experience was gendered, we are omitting an important aspect of a gender analysis of our past. We have only looked at women's experience because we believe that it is women's voices that are most often ignored. Failure to approach the experience of human rights abuses through a gendered lens will lead to the neglect of women's experience of abuse and torture, for these are often seen as a male preserve. We have already seen women in TRC hearings emphasise men's experiences of violence rather than their own. This distorts the reality which was that women too were direct victims of past abuses. While a gender analysis involves examining men and women's differing experiences we have chosen to focus on women's experiences lest they be omitted. We would urge that further studies be undertaken to explore male gender constructions in the experiences of our past.

We do not intend to suggest that men were not also subjected to torture, nor, as the evidence which will be presented here will show, that men, like women, were not also subjected to sexual torture. Men and women experienced sexual torture: electric shocks to genitals, and to women's breasts were commonplace. Both men and women were brutally beaten; slammed against floors and walls; flung around on beams; deprived of sleep; forced to stand or to sit on imaginary chairs for hours; teargassed; held in solitary confinement for months on end and forced to endure days of endless interrogation and even killed. But the nature of these experiences, even the sexual aspects, were felt differently. Assaults on pregnant women, which led to miscarriage, body searches, vaginal examinations, were all assaults on the sexuality and sexual identity of women. Our intention is to show that gender was a key aspect in the power relations which pertained in detention and in prisons in South Africa. We wish to show that there was a keen awareness by the police of the nature of gender power relations, and how this could be used to threaten and engender fear in their victims. Tactics used against women changed considerably during the period under review, as we will show.

The submission begins by examining the reasons for developing a gender analysis of political violence. We then outline our historical analysis of women's role in resistance and their experience of repression and torture from the 1960s to the present. We then examine the three areas of the TRC's work ie: human rights violations, amnesty and reparations and rehabilitation. Within our examination of human rights violations we explore the gendered experiences of victims in a range of situations of political violence. Finally, we suggest that the findings of this report have certain practical implications for the TRC and we make certain proposals in this regard.

Dr Sheila Meintjes
Department of Political Studies
University of The Witwatersrand
Private Bag 3
Wits 2050
Tel:+27 11-716-3339
Fax: +-27 11 403-7482