Righting Sexual Wrongs examines how survivors of sexual violence seek assistance under a racialized system of legal pluralism in the town of Thohoyandou in northeastern South Africa. Over 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I charted itineraries of justice through a variety of sites: a criminal court, trauma clinics, family gatherings, the homes of “traditional healers,” churches, social media and others. I also participated in the daily rhythms of a beauty salon where conversations about sex, love and crime were common. This dissertation argues that sexual harm inhabits survivors in numerous ways, a multiplicity that cannot be reduced to the criminal definition of rape. Survivors did not necessarily talk about injury in terms of force, coercion or consent – ways of reckoning sexual harm invested in liberal ideals of autonomy and freedom-as-separation. Instead, the harm of sexual wrongdoing was spoken of in terms of economic precarity, infidelity, pathological exposure, and the disembodied violence of witchcraft. These understandings of sexual harm were shaped by practices of remedy and restitution, but in ways that challenge spatialized theories of legal pluralism.
The larger context of this study is a post-apartheid South Africa simultaneously grappling with a “rape crisis” and the legal legacy of settler colonialism. Under British indirect rule and then apartheid, ethnic bantustans (“homelands”) held captive Africans subject to a reified form of “customary law.” The policing and prosecution of rape was only ever partial for non-white populations. Today, human rights advocates and policymakers worry that the legacy of this history is popular misrecognition of the problem of sexual violence. This misrecognition is understood to happen at the institutional level, where complaints go unregistered by service providers, but also at the level of individuals, who understand sex as an entitlement owed to men. The result has been a turn to criminal justice materialized in legal, psycho-social, and medical procedures that unevenly affect survivors, accused persons and their respective loved ones. Complicating these efforts at criminalization is the post-apartheid persistence of legal pluralism, as new forms of insecurity have given way to privatized policing and parliamentarians work to legislatively reinstitute the judicial authority of chiefs and kings.
Righting Sexual Wrongs contributes to pressing debates about justice and inequality, debates with a global scope. Ours is a moment when disparate political movements are coalescing around punitive legal reforms in the name of women’s rights. At the same time, demands for criminal justice reform and even prison abolition have become increasingly urgent. Sexual offences are uniquely resistant to such reforms, in part because of how rape is universalized as “a fate worse than death.” The programmatic insistence on the crime of rape as the only way to experience sexual harm justifies state violence that manifests in policing, prosecution and punishment, but also in medical care and counseling for victims. This state violence strikes along existing lines of inequality. In South Africa, it targets ethnic subjects, HIV-positive black men, and poor and working class people. By highlighting the multiple forms sexual wrongdoing takes, this dissertation endorses a structural framing of gender-based violence. In so doing, it rejects a path to justice through personal accountability and punishment, proposing a course to a world without sexual violence through shared responsibility, mutuality and obligation.PHDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162841/1/srupcic_1.pd
