24" x 24" 0il on Canvas (2000) $1500
According to the TRC’s Special Report on Women, a primary aim was:
“... to end the silences around the atrocities under Apartheid.
A primary aim of civil society’s intervention around gender was to end
the silences around the gendered nature of those atrocities.”
Ms. Thenjiwe Mtintso, a former senior member of the ANC’s military
wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, and more recently Head of South Africa’s
Gender Commission, suggests that men use sexual abuse to show how weak the
men of the opposition are and that sexual violence is often used to
destroy the identity of women who have rejected traditional roles.
The TRC report quotes Siefert when she suggests that in a war
situation ‘men’ and the ‘nation’ might collude in silencing
testimony about sexual abuse because:
“The commemoration of female war victims would pass on the violation
of manhood into peacetime. This would be a continuous reminder that
‘national manhood’ has been humiliated by the enemy. What is
chosen instead is the mechanism of repression.” TRC Report,
Vol.4, Ch.10, Footnote #11.
Crimes of sexual abuse occurred in a variety of situations, not all of
which involved a woman’s detention, but the vast majority occurred as
part of the detention, interrogation and confinement experience.
These crimes included:
 | Body searches and vaginal examinations. |
| Rape and forced intercourse with interrogators and other prisoners. |
| Foreign objects, including rats, forced into women’s vaginas. |
| Molestation by prison doctors. |
| Denial of clean change of underwear and protective clothing during menstruation. |
| Electric shocks applied to nipples and genitals of detainees and electric shocks on pregnant women. |
| Giving birth in presence of policemen who laughed at the pain. |
| Women being made the victim of men’s sadistic fantasies. |
| Women being gang-raped in front of their husbands by political opponents. |
| Women suffering sexual abuse, molestation and rape at hands of own comrades in training camps of the various liberation movements. |
| Social expectations of women exploited
by torturers in order to force a confession. (Examples include a
woman being told her child is sick and is in hospital and needs her;
being shown photographs of car accidents and told her children were
fatally hurt; women told they are neglecting their roles to
participate in politics; general humiliation by opponents. Ms. Joyce Dipale, a leader of the Black Consciousness movement who was put in solitary confinement for 500 days and suffered electric shocks on her naked breasts, buttocks and genitals said she “... got used to the pain, but never the humiliation”. ) |
