Gender Violence and the Fairhead Murders GENDERED VIOLENCE AND THE FAIRHEAD MURDERS Sean Jones is a member of the management committee of CRISP. In January 2000 his aunt and 11-year-old cousin were sexually assaulted and murdered by two young men and a 16-year-old male youth. In this short article he recalls something of the past five months since the murders and asks some important questions about research and intervention relating to violent crime. On 16 January this year Brenda Fairhead and her 11-year-old daughter, Kia, were abducted while fishing at the Fish River Mouth. They were subjected to hours of the most horrific abuse and ultimately murdered. On 14 June, almost five months later to the day, their three killers - two 22-year-olds and a youth who was 16 at the time of the murders - were sentenced in the Port Alfred High Court to multiple life sentences. They showed no understanding of the gravity of their acts and they demonstrated no remorse. In last week’s edition of the Mail and Guardian Lin Sampson quoted Nigel Fairhead’s description of his wife and daughter as “two warrior souls” (‘In memory of two warrior souls’, June 15 to 22 2000). Sampson’s sensitive portrayal of Nigel and his pain ended with Nigel’s poignant statement: “I know there is a lesson to be learned....I’m just not sure what the lesson is”. Like Nigel, I too believe there is a lesson to be learned. There are probably multiple lessons. The lessons I learn, or try to learn, may well be different from those of others. I cannot begin to find Nigel’s lesson for him, nor would I presume to do so. All of us - family, friends, society at large - will find our own ways of dealing with these and the other senseless and barbaric acts that all too regularly threaten the fabric of our society. For myself, one of the lessons I am learning comes from Nigel and his example. Another comes from Brenda - a truly vibrant but also serene being whose love of life led her to see and cultivate beauty and good in everything. These lessons are deeply personal and I wish to keep them that way. I only wish it had not taken these events for me to recognise what Nigel and Brenda had to teach. I never had the chance with Kia. But there is also a public lesson that can be exacted from this tragedy. It is that, as a society, we need to take much more seriously than we appear to the clichéd question of why life is so cheap in South Africa. This is a question that most of us ask fairly frequently in some form or another. Yet there remains little attempt to penetrate the causal heart of the matter. The question has become glib and rhetorical. It is asked with a shrug, without any expectation of an answer. But it is far too important a question for this. It cannot be shrugged off. Why is life so cheap in this society? What made three youths view the lives of a little girl and her mother as worthless? Why do South Africans persist in making the beloved country cry? If we are to find constructive answers, we need to understand properly what it is that we are asking, as well as what we are not asking. What we are not asking is why crime per se is so prevalent in our society. It is probably common cause that much crime in South Africa arises from the appalling socio-economic circumstances in which the majority of the men, women and children in this country live. What we are also not asking is why most crime in this country is committed by black South Africans. That this apparent racial skew is a matter of history, severe economic deprivation and demographics will be disputed only by the most ignorant and ideologically abhorrent. What we do need to ask is why violent crime is so rampant. Why is gratuitous violence such a prominent component of crime in our society? Why are Brenda and Kia Fairhead dead? Why were two Belgian tourists gang-raped on the side of an Eastern Cape road? Why were Brenda Atkinson’s niece and Charlene Smith so brutally violated? Why is our society a smorgasbord of brutality, rape and murder? It is indisputable that violent crime in this country is gendered. It is gendered at two levels: violence against women is generally perpetrated by men; and men are the perpetrators of most violent crime, be it against women or other men. No doubt this applies the world over. What differentiates South Africa is the awful scale of it. The fact is that we are an inordinately violent society, and that it is our men - our fathers, our sons, our brothers - who so easily and so brazenly commit these acts. The question then becomes two-tiered: what is it about the nature of men that predisposes them (or some of them) to violence, and why is this aspect of masculinity so grossly pronounced in South Africa? Before sowing some modest seeds of thought about this in the South African context, I should return to the examples I have cited. All the victims - Brenda and Kia, the Belgian tourists, Brenda Atkinson’s niece, Charlene Smith - were white and all the perpetrators were black. This is a product of my own selective memory and perhaps also continued racist coverage by the South African media of incidents of murder and rape. The fact is that black communities are wracked with violent crime and are as traumatised and sickened by it as anyone else. One of the inspiring aspects of the Fairhead trial was the manner in which it was de-racialised by the local community. The crowd present when sentence was passed numbered many hundreds. People overflowed into the courtyards flanking the room. Although men and male youths were present, by far the majority were black women. Dressed in their finery, these women hissed at and threatened the three youths. Afterwards they danced, hugged Nigel, shook his hand. They were joyous. They were celebrating. They were demonstrating solidarity with Brenda and Kia. And they were doing this because their communities, particularly women in their communities, are subject to violent abuse on a daily basis. One of the perpetrators, Bongani (it is strange to me that I think of him and his co-murderers in first-name terms), shouted out as he was bundled into the waiting van on his way to three terms of life imprisonment: “I’ll be back”. A woman in the crowd retorted: “In which life?”. His response was to spit. The difference between these women and Brenda and Kia is that their abuse remains largely invisible. It is not front-paged by the press and it is not headlined by the electronic media. Bongani’s spittle was just one sign of his and some of his peers’ sheer contempt for others, particularly female others. In their largescale presence at the trial, the women of the community were making visible their plight, their pain, their anger. I return to my question: what breeds such a proclivity for violence among the men of this country? What is it that lurks in the psyche of South African men that leads them to such horrific acts? Why do they spit on life? A psychologist friend has put it to me that, in the Fairhead case, three psychopaths happened to be at the same spot at the same time. I would not know the first thing about diagnosing such a condition. But even if all three of Brenda and Kia’s killers are psychopaths, this does not help us to answer the more general question: why is life so cheap in South Africa? Or is it that South Africa has many more psychopaths than most other societies, and that the vast majority of them are male, and that they coalesce socially? If this is so, then the question remains: why? We’re back to much the same problem. At the centre of it all I think, whether naively or not, is value of self or its lack. Disrespect for the lives of others arises from disrespect of self; devaluation of others stems from devaluation of self. It is a matter of self respect. Life is cheap in South Africa because a significant number of South Africans have no self respect and do not value themselves. And - very importantly - they have no self respect and do not value themselves because they do not feel valued, either by their families or by society at large. But why is it men in particular who feel this way? Or, if significant numbers of women also feel undervalued and lack respect for self, why is it primarily among men that these feelings are unleashed through violent action? I do not have answers to these questions but I can perhaps offer some leads. During the early 1990s I spent a number of years conducting research in the Eastern Cape on what I called singlehood (the state of being unmarried) among women. As the crow flies, the community in which I worked is no more than about 30 kilometres from the area where the killers of Brenda and Kia lived and grew up. What I found there, among other things, was an intense resistance to marriage among many women. This resistance was informed by an equally intense rejection of contemporary men, who were viewed as useless, abusive, unreliable, and a drain on precious resources – in short, as worthless. As one woman put it: “I will never marry. The way men treat their wives? Never! There is no money. There is no love. The only thing husbands know how to do is drink too much and love other women. I will never get married.” Others were equally scathing of men: “Why must I marry? There is nothing for me in marriage. A husband will take my money and give it to other women. No. I will stay here in my grandmother’s house. This is my place. I will stay here.” One young woman who lived with her two sisters and their children explained the sisters’ position: “We will never marry, not to anyone. Husbands cause too many problems. They sleep with girlfriends, they drink the money, and they give nothing for the children. Marriage is worthless. That is why we built this house. The house belongs to all of us. We pay for it together, and we look after our children together. We built it so we will always have a place for our children. It is our home. We will always stay in this house.” When asked whether she thought her daughter would marry, one mother responded thus: “No, no, no. She must not marry! The men of today do not know how to behave. They drink too much and they always hit their wives. She must have children and stay by herself. That is the right way for a woman these days.” A divorcee echoed these sentiments: “I am married to my mother. There is no doubt - I will never marry again. Men are bad news. They treat us like dirt in the ground.” For these reasons, significant numbers of women in this community chose to avoid marriage and instead set up co-operative householding and child-rearing arrangements with female kin. In regard to men, the picture that emerged was of large numbers of highly marginalised brothers and sons who had little hope of ever achieving marriage, worthwhile employment, and recognised fatherhood. While their mothers, sisters, aunts, female cousins, and nieces proceeded with the grind of eking out immensely poor but nonetheless dignified lives for themselves and their children, these men simply lingered as added dependants of their (usually female) kin. What does such a life do to men’s senses of self? If female society rejects them, and if one of the primary marks of manhood continues to be marriage and fatherhood, how much do men in these circumstances value themselves? Could the backgrounds of the Fairhead killers have been something like this? I have thus far avoided the very thorny issue of possible cultural influence coming into play in breeding fragile and violent masculinities in South Africa. In the past, liberal and leftist social scientists in this country were loathe to explain negative social phenomena in racial, ethnic or cultural terms, hence the historical materialist and Marxist social analyses of South Africa that prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s. There is also of course the problem that culturalist explanation can so easily be construed as racist explanation. However, the stakes are too high to pussyfoot around political sensitivities. So: are there links between the highly patriarchal heritage of most indigenous Southern African societies, many men’s economic, social and political emasculation, and men’s treatment of women in contemporary society? How has the erosion of men’s traditional roles contributed to fracturing their senses of self? What values are transmitted nowadays when, as part of male initiation rituals, young initiands are tutored in seclusion for six to eight weeks by middle-aged men who are available to perform this task precisely because they themselves are socially emasculated; that is, they are unmarried, unemployed, have no real responsibilities, and have little prospect of any of these things? (In the past, they would have been instructed by male elders – men of dignity, high-standing and integrity.) In the Fairhead case, the three perpatrators had not undergone initiation into manhood and two of them were well overdue for it. Could it be that biologically adult males who could not afford the ritualisation of manhood (the cost in 1991 was a minimum of R800) - and who therefore remained social boys - might have sought other means of being recognised as men? Could it be that the frustration of their poverty, their feelings of worthlessness, and their fatalistic views of their own lives were compounded by their inability to realise adult male status? Could it be that raping a socially inaccessible woman and joy-riding to their friends’ homesteads in her R400 000 four-wheel drive vehicle offered, in some perverted way, a brief moment of exhilarating relief from the frustration of multi-faceted emasculation? The point is that if there are cultural factors at work here, we should not shy from identifying, acknowledging and addressing them head on. Questions such as these are immensely important and need to be prioritised by criminologists and other social scientists involved in research on crime in this country. As things stand, there is precious little meaningful analysis of violent crime. We need a proper research agenda on it - one that asks and answers serious questions about causality and, in particular, that problematises the gendered nature of crime. Whether the outcomes of this research point to psychological, economic, familial, social, or cultural origins, or most likely a combination of them, we need to use these outcomes to construct remedial programmes - programmes that address the deficits in young people’s lives, programmes on self-esteem, programmes on gender relations, programmes on tolerance, and the like. We need to build these programmes into school curricula from an early age; we need to draw parents into them; and we need to harness the goodwill of communities to ensure that they work. (A fine but unfortunately fairly isolated example of such an attempt is the Crime Reduction in Schools Project: see www. und.ac.za/und/cadds/cosl/crisp.html.) But we cannot do this with any worthwhile effect unless we are properly informed by what really lies at the bottom of it all. For the final time, then, what is it about our men - our sense or senses of masculinity - that breeds such brazen brutality? If we can make some progress towards addressing this issue, then Nigel’s warrior souls will surely smile on us in the same way that I believe they must have smiled on the normally silent women of Port Alfred and Peddie who, at the trial, came out like warriors in support of Brenda and Kia and others like them. Their deaths make no moral or human sense. But we can use their deaths as an impetus to build a sense of morality and humanity and to better a land that Brenda, a foreigner by birth, literally and figuratively poured her heart into. This is what the women of the Eastern Cape were attempting at the trial. Brenda and Kia can be more than an example. They are an inspiration. Sean Jones 20 June 2000


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